“Eugen Bacon is an exhilarating writer. Her work is daring, fierce, visceral and sensual, fast paced and packed with action, earthed yet given to flights of fancy. It is driven by empathy for the eccentric and marginalised, a simmering anger at injustice and inequality, and a deep concern for the big questions—the scorching impact of climate change, the sharp double-edged sword of fast-changing technology, the destructive mania of dictators, and the immigrants' deep pain at separation and ache at leaving the homeland. A true original who glories in language and gives uncompromising reign to the imagination.”
—ARNOLD ZABLE, writer, novelist, and human rights activist
“Brilliant, erudite, playful – Bacon’s new collection of short stories is a feast of literary delights, which takes us places around the world and into parallel realities, and into the past, present and future. Bacon is a wizard of genres, bending and blending them at her masterful will, at home in horror and tragedy just as much as in comedy. And even at the bleakest, most dystopian moments, Bacon’s pages still shimmer with the sensual beauty of her prose.”
—LEE KOFMAN, award-winning author of Split and Imperfect
“Lyrical, rich, oftentimes dark and sometimes hopeful, Danged Black Thing is a speculative fiction collection that takes the reader on a journey from Africa to Australia… With the lyricism of Toni Morrison and the worldbuilding of Ken Liu, Bacon secures herself as an important voice in Australian genre fiction. Danged Black Thing is the feminist science fiction debut that brings women and Blackness to the forefront."
—Jing Xuan Teo, BOOKS+PUBLISHING
“Bacon’s writing is so assured, so deliberate, so interesting – reading it, you’d be forgiven for mistaking this book for one by a best-selling international author with decades of publishing under their belt and a large editorial machine behind them.”
—THE AUSTRALIAN
“Boundaries dissolve here, as do the borders between literatures. No two stories here are the same, yet all are sensual and intense as a tropical garden, full of flowers and fruit.”
—THE AGE / SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
“Time and place are distinctly fluid in Eugen Bacon’s collection of stories.”
—THE BIG ISSUE
“Seventeen genre-bending stories from Bacon (Mage of Fools) come together to form a masterful, Afrofuturist exploration of gender, class, race, and belonging… With poetic prose, an eclectic range of subgenres, and affecting observations on Blackness and womanhood, this collection showcases Bacon at the top of her game.”
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.