Product Description
Longlisted for the 2016 Stella Prize.
A woman starts out from a quiet corner of Glebe in Sydney towards the bustle of Broadway and Surry Hills, carrying with her the manuscript of a childhood friend who has recently died. Her thoughts surge between past and present as she strives to understand the effect her friend’s manuscript, Panthers and the Museum of Fire, has had on her. Not only does the manuscript remind her of what she might prefer to forget – youthful ambitions, an abandoned friendship, entanglements with religion and anorexia – it also ignites in her a creative impulse. First published in 2015 by Spineless Wonders.
Praise For Jen Craig
“Panthers and the Museum of Fire will be among my top reads for the year. Bold, original
and urgent, it is a complex work of fictionalised-memoir in the style of writers such as
Karl Ove Knausgaard and Sheila Heti.”
ANGIE ANDREWES, Books + Publishing
“You’re in the midst of a conversation, which is my favourite kind on Bookworm, with a writer
who may be making her way into World Literature…. I found this novel to be an immense,
rich, and complex pleasure. I read it three times.”
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT, Bookworm
“Panthers and the Museum of Fire is an internal foray into consciousness-driven modernist
writing and is easily a beautiful addition to the Knausgaard/Ellman/Ferrante genre.”
GARRETT ZECKER, The Collidescope
“Panthers and the Museum of Fire defies every piece of well-meant advice handed out to
novelists. The language is strange and obsessive, its central character is written with no
regard as to whether the reader will like or care about her, the plot is obscure and frustrating,
the setting is never picturesque. And yet it succeeds brilliantly.”
ALI JANE SMITH
REVIEWS
“The unpretentious truths and agonies, soul-searching and tenuous self-regard of the artist’s life are brilliantly and immediately depicted, in writing that deploys European modernist literary techniques in an Australian setting. In Jen Craig’s novella, voice, character and vocation combine in a sophisticated and accessible narrative.” Judges’ report, 2016 Stella Prize
“It is the ideal book for those who are interested not in the destination of a plot but in the interior journey of a character, just as it is the ideal work of art for anyone interested in the experience of being trapped within one mind, but gently so.” KIRAN BHAT, Newton Review of Books
“There is so much that is intriguing in Panthers…Jen Craig is concerned with both loss of memory and the falsification of experience and she explores her themes through the technique [Sebald] pioneered, a hypnotic “mash-up” of fact and fiction.” VANESSA CARTWRIGHT, South Sydney Herald
