The Bloody Chamber, Wise Children, Fireworks: Introduction by Joan Acocella (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics)

Carter, Angela

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1101907991 ISBN 13: 9781101907993

Publisher: Everyman's Library, 2018

An omnibus of works by the great British writer that showcases her hauntingly erotic fabulism and the subversive richness of her imagination.

In The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter's famous collection of deeply unsettling stories inspired by fairy tales, we see a Beauty who turns into a Beast, Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother stoned as a werewolf, and Bluebeard as a murderous, porn-addicted businessman. In the surreally delightful novel Wise Children, an elderly woman recounts the colorful life she and her identical twin sister led as vaudeville performers. And the early story collection Fireworks reveals Carter taking her first forays into the fantastical writing that was to become her unforgettable legacy. As critic Laura Miller has argued, "Most contemporary literary fiction with a touch of magic owes something to Angela Carter's trailblazing." This Everyman's Library omnibus gathers the best of Angela Carter in one astonishing volume.

Review:

"Angela Carter was a great writer. . . She was that rare thing, a real one-off, nothing like her on the planet . . . Her books unshackle us, toppling the statues of the pompous, demolishing the temples and commissariats of righteousness . . . They are without equal, and without rival . . . With Angela Carter's death English literature has lost its high sorceress, its benevolent witch-queen, a burlesque artist of genius and antic grace."
--Salman Rushdie, THE NEW YORK TIMES

"She writes a prose that lends itself to magnificent set pieces . . . dreams, myths, fairy tales, metamorphoses, the unruly unconscious, epic journeys, and a highly sensual celebration of sexuality in both its most joyous and darkest manifestations."
--Ian McEwan

"She was, among other things, a quirky, original, and baroque stylist, a trait especially marked in The Bloody Chamber--her vocabulary a mix of finely tuned phrase, luscious adjective, witty aphorism, and hearty, up-theirs vulgarity."
--Margaret Atwood, THE OBSERVER

"The Bloody Chamber is such an important book to me. Angela Carter, for me, is still the one who said: 'You see these fairy stories? Actually, each one of them is a loaded gun. Each of them is a bomb. Watch: if you turn it right it will blow up.'"
--Neil Gaiman, THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

"[The Bloody Chamber] is her great book, the one that only she could have written . . . The strange things in those tales--the werewolves and snow maidens, the spider-hung caves and liquefying mirrors--are made to live again by means of a prose informed by the wonders of cinema and psychoanalysis and Symbolist poetry."
--from the Introduction by Joan Acocella

About the Author:

ANGELA CARTER (1940-1992) was an English novelist, short story writer, and journalist. She wrote nine novels and numerous short stories, as well as nonfiction, radio plays, and the screenplay for Neil Jordan's 1984 movie The Company of Wolves, based on her story of the same name. Carter won numerous literary awards, traveled and taught widely in the United States, and lived in London.