I think we should go into the jungle

Paperback

Published 1989

1989 Wattie Award Finalist

1990 NZ Book Award Finalist

Short stories from Barbara Anderson.

Praise for I think we should go into the jungle
‘… this must be one of the sharpest collections in English since Carver's Cathedral in 1984. Anderson has an important gift: she notices everything. She's been compared to Flaubert, and the comparison does not seem senselessly extravagant. She is able to convey how people get on with each other in the briefest of dialogues … Barbara Anderson's stories are about love, grief and everyday emotional erosion; about our intuitive sense of larger meaning; about the daily preoccupations that block our view of those intuitions. They are freighted with experience, fresh with insight, told with a mature economy that knows where civilised behaviour stops and the jungle within begins.’
—Michael Hulse, Guardian Weekly

‘Her work has the assurance, the verbal dexterity, and the solidity of specification that marks the professional.’
—Paul Day, Waikato Times

‘Never portentous, never trivial, marvellously comic but with grey skeins of pathos, this is surely among the most powerful collections of stories produced in New Zealand. Its unerring economy of effects suggests at times the quality of a Flaubert, a Patrick White, a Grace Paley. To have achieved such brilliance in a first book is remarkable.’
—Ian Reid, Listener