Bug Week: & Other Stories

A science educator in domestic chaos fetishizes Scandinavian furniture. White-collar deadbeats attend a swinger's party in the era of drunk Muldoon. A pervasive smell seeps through the walls of a German housing block. A seabird performs at an open-mic night.

Bug Week is a scalpel-clean examination of male entitlement, a dissection of death, an agar plate of mundanity. From 1960s Wellington to post-Communist Germany, Airini Beautrais traverses the weird, the wry, and the grotesque in a story collection of human taxonomy. For readers of contemporary literary fiction and New Zealand short stories.