Excitable Girls out in the world.

**Indi Book Awards 2023 Debut Fiction longlist. Read more
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** Readings Must-read Australian debut fiction from 2022. "Funny and full-bodied, Casey-Hardy’s writing crackles with a restless energy." Read more
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(Image credit: The Convesation)

**Casey-Hardy co-opts the tradition of short tales “of mystery and imagination”, for feminist purposes. Through these multiple narratives, she depicts both the hypocritical and violent expectations enforced on girls and women – and the means by which they resist them. Read more
Ariella Van Luyn The Conversation
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**Cautionary tales for Excitable Girls in ABR's Books of the Year for 2022 - "In terms of fiction, Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls (Scribner, 10/22) blew my head off – in the best possible way. Anne Casey-Hardy creates little shards of stories that distil all the violence and mystery and drama of girlhood into a few scant pages."
Read more
Yves Rees ABR December 2022, no. 449**

**Cautionary Tales strives to exhume the feminist manifesto with the rallying cries of today’s sisterhood: our right to have agency, own our bodies, get drunk but not be ‘asking for it’, and fundamentally, to rule the world, regardless of whether we are smart enough, privileged enough or have ‘earned the right’. Read more
Charle Malycon "Women Rule in Modern Gothic" Meanjin
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Writers often talk about following the heat and gosh I felt that in these stories. Casey-Hardy locates the source of that narrative heat and energy in each story and then presses your hand to the fire.
Jaclyn Crupi Hill of Content Bookshop

Love short stories? You’d be hard pressed to find a collection better than Anne Casey-Hardy’s treasure trove.
Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls is an outstanding debut, with stories that stick in your mind, long after reading them. Read more
Paula Thompson Arts Hub

There is something so very satisfying about a good short story, and this collection is a delightful
reading experience full of moments of otherworldly recognition, real experience and unknowable
mystery. Sisterhood, motherhood and friendships – lost, revived or lamented – are all explored with
dreamlike clarity, grounded in the beauty of the natural world and the familiarity of home and work. Read more
Margaret Snowdon Readings

The title of this book Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls (Scribner 2022) is exactly what is says: warning stories for adventurous females. In one sense it’s an old-fashioned expression but do not let that fool you! This collection of short stories by debut author Anne Casey-Hardy is bright and sparkling like a jewelled crown, but step too close and those gemstones are sharp and cutting. Read more
Cass Moriarty

Anne Casey-Hardy’s debut collection of short stories bristles with energy, menace and joy. With a
title that conjures the folk stories told to frighten children away from forbidden acts, Cautionary
Tales for Excitable Girls promises the kind of misadventure best summed up by the warning, “Mum
would have said, Well what do you expect if you go down to the creek at night?” Read more
Justine Hyde The Saturday Paper, October 1, 2022

Endorsements

(Photo credit:Hill of Content Bookshop)

Excitable girls rush out to meet life; what could go wrong?

I find myself haunted by this innocent, menacing, blackly funny and fabulous book. Anne Casey-Hardy’s writing hums with a dangerous, coiled energy in sly, ghostly stories of girls and women striking back, lying low, busting out, triumphing even while sinking. Casey-Hardy is a raw, rare talent with an unforgettable voice.
- Charlotte Wood, author of The Weekend and The Natural Way of Things

Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls buzzes with energy. Anne Casey-Hardy is a wonderful fiction writer. Her characters are brave and full of soul. In mapping the lives and the places where stories thrive, she also touches our hearts. Such a gift.
- Tony Birch, author of Dark as Last Night and Ghost River

Electric, irreverent, haunting, heart-breaking – Anne Casey-Hardy's Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls is one of the best short story collections you'll ever read. With a pitch-perfect voice and wicked sense of humour, Casey-Hardy unleashes 18 unforgettable stories that centre on adolescent girls and young women living dangerously... An exceptional debut from a hugely talented writer.
- Wayne Marshall, author of Shirl

Casey-Hardy's stories cast a deep and unusual spell. Her collection is sharp, irreverent, and unexpectedly funny. I loved it.
- Laura Elvery, author of A Trick of the Light and Ordinary Matter

What a thrill it is to find a truly distinctive new voice. Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls captures the essence of girlhood: raw, fierce, fearless, and crackling with energy and desire. An impressive and inspiring work of fiction.
- Emily Bitto, author of Wild Abandon and The Strays

I love these stories, and Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls will take centre stage on my bookshelf. They’re deep and dark, but also uproariously funny, and never anything but hopeful. Each girl or woman in these stories faces the reader and tells the truth, and I can’t ask for more than that. Cross the precision and absurdity of George Saunders with the searching intelligence of Angela Carter, and add the technical brilliance of Alice Munro, and you might have some idea of what Anne can do, but in fact her writing is wholly her own, and wholly original. Australian literature will be very much richer for her Cautionary Tales!
- Tegan Bennett Daylight, author of The Details and Six Bedrooms

You’ll be transfixed by the misadventures of Casey-Hardy's dangerously innocent heroines. Her fractured fairy tales are like nothing you’ve come across before: unnerving, brilliant, hilarious, heart-stirring.
- Lucinda Holdforth, author of Leading Lines

I love these fierce, wild girls and the off-kilter troubles they find themselves in. Anne Casey-Hardy creates slightly surrealist worlds full of emphatically true details: risks we've all taken, worries we've all had, rules we wish we'd broken. These are stories laced through with menace and joy, and Casey-Hardy has an eye that slices to the bone of what it is to be a girl in this world.
- Jane Rawson, author of A History of Dreams and The Wreck

Delightfully surprising, the stories in this collection switch between stark realism and strangeness in the best of ways. Suffused with wry humour, and deftly drawn characters, Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls delivers a kaleidoscopic navigation of the self-consciousness, escapism, and fractured thinking that attends life’s transformative experiences. These stories live and breathe on the cusps of life and the transitions we chart as we pass through and beyond it.
- Melissa Manning, author of Smokehouse

About Anne

Anne Casey-Hardy is an award-winning fiction writer who lives and writes in Melbourne’s west, on Bunurong land. Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls , published by Scribner in September 2022, is her first book.
She is represented by Gaby Naher of Left Bank Literary.

You can find out more about Anne Casey-Hardy's life and writing:* on her publisher's author page* in this interview with the UTS Literary Society* in The First Time podcast's featured book discussion (S5 Ep184 at 19.00 minutes)* in this podcast In Praise of Difficult Women from the Sydney Writers' Festival 2023

Contact

For publicity enquiries, please contact Anna O’Grady at Simon & Schuster:
anna.ogrady [at] simonandschuster.com.au

To contact Anne Casey-Hardy, please use the form below: