Fiction. Women's Studies. Julia Brennan's debut novel, HUNTING SEASON, is part auto-fiction, part lyric essay, part lament, part film journal, part performance, and part exorcism. Challenging traditional victim/perpetrator narratives, HUNTING SEASON is an intimate investigation into the ways we learn to love and wound.
A kind of fortress: elaborately constructed, designed to protect and to withstand the dangers that are everywhere around us. An imaginative, frightening and heartbreaking tour de force.--Carole Maso
Brennan's cinematic fiction moves through the vignette-influenced narrative landscape with an expression of loneliness like a rifle flung over the hard shoulder of postmodern storytelling: you never know when her rifle will go off, leaving you bruised, cut in halves or quarters, or heartbroken. HUNTING SEASON is 'a slow amputation' of love, film, disaster, agony, tamed or nonchalant sadomasochism and sexual fantasies?. Come here and let her destroy you. Tenderly.--Vi Khi Nao
HUNTING SEASON frees the bildungsroman from its orthodox chronologies and wearisome protagonists. As in Ferrante, we see a woman artist come of age. She comes of age, ages, travels back, comes again. How best to repurpose an education in patriarchy? Like Ferrante, or Amina Cain, Eugene Lim, or Cristina Rivera Garza, Julia Brennan refuses to sacrifice to the gods of narrative arc. HUNTING SEASON plots in phenomenological ecotones, those sites produced in the connective tissue between mothers and children, hunters and prey, lovers and lover's ghosts, or the multiple paramours of a single artist.--Danielle Pafunda
