“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)

“Julia Brennan’s brilliant debut Hunting Season is an explosive, evocative prose hybrid, where love and art wreck, and it is messy, but it is never bloodless. It is a collision of the non-fictions we survive and the fictions we use to recover, prose as cauterization, as field dressing. Brennan's wit is razor sharp and she is uniquely visual, and ready to level a steely gaze, and line a site. Hunting Season is scattershot, a carcass to be carved, cooked and served. “ (JOANNA HOWARD)

“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. Reading in the close space between these orbiting bodies, we ask what might be the nearest document to experience itself. Is it the house in which we store one or two perfect memories or the body in which we store every perfect feeling? Is it the shaky diary entry, the shaky video posted to YouTube? A young girls shakes when she kills a first deer. The artist shakes.” (DANIELLE PAFUNDA)