Fiction

Portable Curiosities by Julie Koh

by Cassandra Atherton •

August 2016, no. 383

University of Queensland Press $19.95 pb, 240 pp, 9780702254048

Fiction

Portable Curiosities by Julie Koh

by Cassandra Atherton •

August 2016, no. 383

Julie Koh's first full-length short story collection, Portable Curiosities, is an electrifying satire on Anglo-Australian hegemony and the underbelly of the Australian Dream. In twelve stories populated with ghostly lizard boys, 3D yellow people who step out of the cinema screen like the Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), and girls who grow cat ears and tails, Koh provides an existential context for the social effects of consumerism, sexism, misogyny, and racism.

Cassandra Atherton

Cassandra Atherton is a poet and scholar. She is Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin University. She was a Harvard Visiting Fellow in English and a Visiting Scholar in Comparative Culture at Sophia University, Tokyo. She is writing a book of prose poetry on the atomic bomb with funding from an Australia Council grant.