Bug Week & Other Stories – Airini Beautrais
$12.00
Short stories with bite. Bug Week is an award-winning collection that explores the grotesque, the mundane, the erotic and the absurd in everyday life. Smart, strange and full of sting, this is domestic fiction with a twist — and often, a splatter.
2021 Reprint (Softcover)
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📍 Publisher: Victoria University Press
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📖 Edition: Reprint 2021 (originally published 2020)
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🧼 Condition: Ex-library. Well-read but clean interior. Spine intact, light cover markings.
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📚 Notes: Includes Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize sticker on front cover.
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✅ Only 1 copy in stock
Description
Author: Airini Beautrais
Publisher: Victoria University Press (2020)
ISBN: 978-1-77656-305-0
In brief
Short stories with bite. Bug Week is an award-winning collection that explores the grotesque, the mundane, the erotic and the absurd in everyday life. Smart, strange and full of sting, this is domestic fiction with a twist — and often, a splatter.
About the book
In Bug Week, Airini Beautrais delivers a powerful series of vignettes that peel back the layers of modern life and womanhood with intelligence, wit and unease. These aren’t just stories — they’re autopsies of relationships, systems, and small-town expectations.
We meet seedy academics, disaffected teachers, aimless mothers, confused lovers, and characters who drift (or lurch) through settings ranging from Communist East Germany to the Wanganui River. The collection’s themes of sex, science, loss, rage, and power dynamics are tackled through prose that is clean and unflinching, often turning on a dime from comic to devastating.
Beautrais’ background as a poet is evident in the control of her sentences — she knows exactly when to punch, and when to pause. The opening story, “Bug Week,” with its voyeuristic entomologist, sets the tone for a collection that is equal parts grubby and elegant.
This book is not afraid to go weird or to go deep. And it refuses to apologise for either.
Reviewer praise
“One of the most arresting story collections published in Aotearoa in years.” — The Spinoff
“Poised, piercing, and often hilarious. Beautrais is a master of discomfort.” — Newsroom
“An unflinching look at womanhood, knowledge, power and rot — in all the best ways.” — NZ Book Awards judges’ citation
“Imagine Katherine Mansfield with a cynical sense of humour and a biology degree.” — The Listener
“Dark, brilliant, and compulsively readable.” — Goodreads reviewer
“These stories crawl under your skin and stay there.” — Unity Books Review
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