Madness in Bloom

edited by Ross Watkins & Jay Ludowyke

Creative anthology

Succumb to madness. 

To the euphoria of love, the torment of loss, the yearning for truth, the whimsy of daydreams and the reckoning of nightmares.

This eclectic collection of 62 works by emerging Australian writers features realism and surrealism, romance and murder, the paranormal and the poetic, the magical and the monstrous. Humour. Death. Sci-fi, fantasy, essay, epistle, fiction and nonfiction. The erotic. The historic. Even the religious and the political. 

There are no boundaries. Only possibilities. Existing in dreams, reality and reverie… 

A game of wits between a girl, a glass horse, a blurred woman and a black knight. Reflections of a sex worker tending a new client. Intimacy and conception—or neither and both. A pickleball champion in a deadly match. Emotions stolen from artistic masterpieces. Astronauts on a ship who are not alone. Thoughts behind the veil. Islands of dreams. Infidelity and revenge. First love. Secrets. The unspeakable. The unfathomable.

It’s rare for one collection to house such breadth of imagination and insanity. To prod at our hearts with emotional electrodes. And to remind us that we’re all puppets in padded cells.  

Enter the asylum. Experience Madness in Bloom.