Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories

Eugen Bacon's work is deemed cheeky with a fierce intelligence in text that's resplendent, delicious, dark and evocative. NPR called her novel Claiming T-Mo 'a confounding mysterious tour de force.' The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories imbues the same lushness in a writerly language that is Bacon's own. This peculiar hybrid of the untraditional, the extraordinary within, without and along the borders of normalcy will hypnotize and absorb the reader with tales that refuse to be labeled. The stories in this collection are dirges that cross genres in astounding ways. Over 20 provocative tales, with seven original to this collection, by an award-winning African-Australian author.

'The Road to Woop Woop, plays with the genres of speculative fiction and magic realism. Using familiar tropes such as time travel, shapeshifting, and prescient characters, the stories typically refuse formulaic outcomes...a highly entertaining and thought-provoking ride.' — Australian Book Review

'A commanding and visionary collection of speculative shorts, encompassing surrealism, fantasy, science fiction, and gorgeous, painterly literary fiction. It would be a disservice to call any of these 24 stories the standout, as each is impressive and beautifully rendered in Bacon's distinct, poetic voice...Bacon's impeccable work is sure to blow readers away.' — Publishers Weekly, starred review

'Bacon's passion for language and her willingness to play with the short-story form, to never settle on one type of narrative or genre, make this an exciting collection that's well worth picking up.' — Ian Mond, Locus Magazine

'In Australia, the slang expression 'woop woop' can be used to describe 'the middle of nowhere'. However, each of these twenty-four distinctive stories took me on a journey which always ended up somewhere, even if that final destination wasn't quite where I'd imagined it would be and, in a nutshell, that captures for me much of the magic of Eugen Bacon's awesome storytelling.' — Linda Hepworth, NB Magazine

'An exciting and transcendent literary experience with an air of magic anybody should be able to appreciate.' — Maddison Stoff, Aurealis Reviews