Book description
Extraordinary and diverse people inhabit this rich, ripe,
occasionally raucous collection of short stories. Some are based on
real people - Jeanne Duval, Baudelaire's handsome and reluctant muse
who never asked to be called the Black Venus, trapped in the terminal
ennui of the poet's passion, snatching at a little lifesaving
respectability against all odds...Edgar Allen Poe, with his face of a
actor, demonstrating in every thought and deed how right his friends
were when they said 'No man is safe who drinks before breakfast.'
And some of these people are totally imaginary. Such as the
seventeenth century whore, transported to Virginia for thieving, who
turns into a good woman in spite of herself among the Indians, who
have nothing worth stealing. And a girl, suckled by wolves, strange
and indifferent as nature, who will not tolerate returning to
humanity.
Angela Carter wonderfully mingles history, fiction, invention,
literary criticism, high drama and low comedy in a glorious collection
of stories as full of contradictions and surprises as life itself.
Angela Carter was born in 1940 and read English at Bristol
University, before spending two years living in Japan. She lived and
worked extensively in the United States and Australia. Her first novel,
Shadow Dance
, was published in 1965, followed by the
Magic Toyshop
in 1967, which went on to win the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. She wrote
a further four novels, together with three collections of short stories,
two works of non-fiction and a volume of collected writings. Angela
Carter died in 1992.
