Belly Up is a story collection at the intersection of the real and the surreal. With the absurd always tethered to a recognisable reality, it captures the messiness of human behaviour as it ranges from the macabre to the tender, the playful to the shocking.
Shapeshifting and enchantment haunt and propel these stories, as characters question the bodies they've been given and what their bodies require to be sustained: teenage girls morph into plants, gulag prisoners perform makeshift surgery and a child licks exposed electric wires, turning her tongue black. Visceral, cinematic and deeply human, Belly Up explores the simultaneous mundanity and singularity of the human condition – and reveals Rita Bullwinkel to be an audacious and original talent.