A host of short story collections photographed against a red background

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Reading lists

12 short story collections to sink into

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Where to start with Angela Carter’s books

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What to read after The Handmaid’s Tale

Love

An excessively stylish tale about a fatal love triangle in provincial Bohemia..The novel and its afterword form a fascinating study, an erstwhile aesthetic object unravelled into realism and commitment

Carter observes her characters with a cool detachment as if they were specimens on a slide. She catches acutely the dying throes of the love generation, when Swinging London had run to seed

Angela Carter has language at her fingertips

Whatever her subject, Angela Carter writes like a dream - sometimes a nightmare

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

Short and strange, this is a story about a dark and depraved love triangle: Annabel lives with both her young, beautiful husband, Lee, and his demonic brother, Buzz. 
 
Their cohabitation produces inescapable, dangerous emotional energy, contained within two rooms. Annabel is a fearful, ethereal artist entirely in her own world. Buzz is a ragged camera-wielding man of sharp intelligence and profound self-absorption. Lee is a simple boy who understands neither his wife nor his brother. He is also having an affair with another woman, a betrayal with the power to warp even further their dark and perverse love triangle... 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY AUDREY NIFFENEGGER 
 
'A stylish tale about a fatal love triangle in provincial Bohemia' Guardian

Nights at the Circus

Angela Carter was born in 1940. She lived in Japan, the United States and Australia. Her first novel, Shadow Dance, was published in 1965. Her next book, The Magic Toyshop, won the John Llewllyn Rhys Prize and the next, Several Perceptions, the Somerset Maugham Award. She died in February 1992.

Welcome to the circus - strange, dirty and shameless, this is greatest show on Earth. 
 
Sophie Fevvers is a seductress, a braggart and an aerialiste extraordinaire in Colonel Kearney's circus. She is also part woman, part swan. 
 
Jack Walser, an American journalist, is on a quest to discover the truth behind her identity. Dazzled by his love for her, and desperate for the scoop of a lifetime, Walser has no choice but to join the circus on its magical tour through turn-of-the-nineteenth-century London, St Petersburg and Siberia. 
 
**One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World** 
 
READER LOVE - JOIN THE CIRCUS: 
'My God. What a breathtaking journey.' 
'It plays itself out like a fabulous carnival.' 
'Now I'm done, and I don't know what to do with myself' 
'[B]eautifully written and surprisingly life-affirming, while also being strange, sly, and sexed-up' 
'Angela Carter's world is, as always, a dirty, earthy, erotic, yet soaringly ethereal place to spend one's time' 
 
The Vintage Classics Weird Girls series: Dive into the depraved, delectable depths of weird fiction with nine books by nine pioneering female authors. Bold, disruptive, chilling and enchanting, these tales of the weird are strange enough to get lost in.

The Angela Carter BBC Radio Drama Collection

Angela Carter was one of the most important writers of the 20th Century. A pioneer of British magical realism, her work was described by Salman Rushdie as 'without rival and without equal'. Her radical, inventive novels influenced countless writers, while her dark, sensual short fiction turned traditional fables inside out, giving women the power over their desires and fates. 
 
Susannah Clapp, Angela Carter's literary executor and friend, introduces the productions and offers fascinating insights into Angela Carter's life and work. 
 
This landmark collection includes five new dramatisation of stories from her iconic collection of fairytales retold, The Bloody Chamber. Alongside the title story are 'The Erl-King', 'Wolf-Alice', 'The Tiger's Bride' and 'The Company of Wolves', with casts including Sophie Cookson, Ariyon Bakare, Lily Lesser, Hannah Genesius and Adjoa Andoh. A sixth tale from The Bloody Chamber, 'Puss in Boots', is adapted by Carter herself and stars Andrew Sachs as Puss. 
 
Also included is an adaptation of Carter's award-winning Nights at the Circus, starring Roisin Conaty as Cockney trapeze artist Sophie Fevvers, and the world premiere of her unproduced screenplay The Christchurch Murder. Based on the real-life story of two New Zealand schoolgirls who killed for love, it was an inspiration for the Peter Jackson film Heavenly Creatures, and stars Fiona Shaw, Nancy Carroll and James Wilby. 
 
Accompanying these are three thrilling radio plays: the Gothic Vampirella (starring Jessica Raine and Anton Lesser); the hallucinatory drama-documentary Come Unto These Yellow Sands (featuring James Anthony Rose as patricidal painter Richard Dadd); and an exploration of the life of Ronald Firbank, A Self-Made Man (with Lewis Fiander as Firbank). 
 
Finally, Liza Ross reads the short story 'Lizzie's Tiger', originally commissioned for radio, in which the four-year-old Lizzie Borden has an extraordinary encounter at the circus. 
 
A bonus documentary, Third Ear: Angela Carter, comprises Paul Bailey's lively interview with the author, recorded shortly before her death in 1992. In it, she discusses her novel Wise Children, and examines the impact of Britishness, politics, and the oral tradition on her subversive writing. 
 
Contents 
1 Introduction 
2 The Bloody Chamber 
3 The Erl-King 
4 Wolf-Alice 
5 The Tiger's Bride 
6 The Company of Wolves 
7 The Christchurch Murder 
8-9 Nights at the Circus (in two parts) 
10 Vampirella 
11 Come Unto These Yellow Sands 
12 Puss in Boots 
13 A Self-Made Man 
14 Lizzie's Tiger 
15 Third Ear: An Interview with Angela Carter 
 
Credits 
Linking material by Susannah Clapp was produced by Caroline Raphael at Dora Productions. 
 
The Bloody Chamber stories, The Christchurch Murder, Vampirella and Come Unto These Yellow Sands were produced by Fiona McAlpine at Allegra Productions. 
 
All other programmes produced by the BBC. 
 
© 2021 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd 
(p) 2021 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

Angela Carter was born in 1940. She lived in Japan, the United States and Australia. Her first novel, Shadow Dance, was published in 1965. Her next book, The Magic Toyshop, won the John Llewllyn Rhys Prize and the next, Several Perceptions, the Somerset Maugham Award. She died in February 1992.

The Bloody Chamber, Wise Children, Fireworks

An omnibus of works by the great novelist and short-story writer, showcasing her hauntingly erotic fabulism and the subversive richness of her imagination.

She writes a prose that lends itself to magnificent set pieces of fastidious sensuality

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.

In The Bloody Chamber, Carter's famous collection of deeply unsettling stories inspired by fairy tales, a Beauty is turned into a Beast and Little Red Riding's grandmother is stoned to death as a witch; a young music student is swept off her feet in Paris by a middle-aged aristocrat and transported to his ancestral abode to re-enact the story of Bluebeard against a sumptuous fin de siècle background; a British soldier on a cycling holiday in Transylvania in the summer of 1914 finds himself the guest of an alluring female vampire. By contrast, in Wise Children, Carter's last novel), the comic, the bawdy and the life-enhancing prevail. An irrepressible elderly lady recalls the many colourful decades she and her sister spent as vaudeville performers - a tale as full of twins and mistaken identities as any plot of Shake- speare's. The early collection, Fireworks, reveals Carter taking her first forays into the fantastic writing that was to become her unforgettable legacy. The Everyman's Library omnibus gathers the best of Angela Carter in one astonishing volume.

Fireworks

The first short story collection by Angela Carter – the book that presaged The Bloody Chamber.

It is hard to imagine the literary landscape without Angela Carter. Hers is a legacy that extends way beyond the bounds of her own work

I can't think of anyone who is at that pitch of intellectual commentary, fictional experimentation and fullness of expression. I'm not a patch on her. Jesus, I wish I was

Its autobiographical stories set in Japan, where she had gone to live with a Japanese lover, give off a direct and poignant emotion. They show her changing, too

Daringly and dangerously erotic, exploring the dark recesses of female sexuality

Still remarkable for their darkly allusive imagery...this collection displays the same slightly chilling morality as her early novels

‘I started to write short pieces when I was living in a room too small to write a novel in.’ So says Angela Carter of this collection, written during a period living in Toyko. These exotic, sensuous stories represent Carter’s first major achievement in the short story form. Lush imaginary forests, a murderous puppet show and an expressionistic vision of Japan: each one instantly conjures an atmosphere, dark and luminous in turn, and from the recognisably daring imagination of one of the great twentieth-century stylists.

Collected Journalism and Writings

Shaking A Leg

Forthright, funny, unpredictable: Carter is capable of illuminating any topic with the brilliance of her prose.

Shaking a Leg reveals a stunning range of interests that marks her out not just as one of our greatest novelists and short story writers but as one of our best literary and cultural critics... If you would like better to understand the workings of the second half of our century, then this is the book

Reading Shaking a Leg is like sitting down with a friend who is clever, funny, outrageous, compassionate, anecdotal and sociologically aware; someone with a great memory and a quirky, associative train of thought; someone who can make you laugh and say "yes" out loud before you turn the page to devour her next paragraph, whether it be about Hollywood or Venice, her dotty parents or her favourite writers. Carter is endlessly entertaining, endearing and down-to-earth in this admirably comprehensive collection

It is her journalism, collected in the 1997 volume 'Shaking a Leg', to which I find myself returning again and again, struck freshly by its forthrightness, its imagination, its unpredictability - and by the sheer range of subjects on which she was fluent

The range of her interests is quite dazzling. She is the voice of an entire generation

Shocking, willful, extravagant - every cut and quip at the same time reveals a striking intellectual acuity

This collection is a must... The writing is trenchant, acerbic, witty, probing, and often critically subtle

Some of her best, wittiest writing is here...Shaking a Leg contains some of the best essays since Orwell

Shaking a Leg...explains what makes her a great and indispensable talent...there's the gold she left behind in this book, a treasury of her life and art and thought

A treasure trove...You quickly start needing to read bits out to people...For one thing she's extremely funny: for another, she's cantankerous as hell, with a bullshit antenna of NASA-engineered proportions...Stunning, an inspiring, delightful breath of air

Shaking a Leg is packed with deliciously tongue-in-cheek wit about the everyday world of the 1970s and 1980s. She is mistress of the arresting opening and the bathetic end

These essays on culture and society first appeared from the Sixties to the Eighties: together, they prove that the despised press could breed the best in post-war thinking and writing; and that, in an age of woozy fantasy, witty rationality could still prevail

Incisive cultural journalism by the British novelist that among other delicious subversions invokes the Greeks to argue for wearing high heels with long skirts

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.

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY RACHEL COOKE 
 
Reading Shaking a Leg is like spending time with the funniest, wisest friend you’ve ever had; a person whose breadth of interest ranges from food to feminism to science fiction, and everything in between; a person with an entirely unpredictable train of thought but whose exuberance, knowledge and insight sweeps you along. Bursting with ideas, culturally astute and sparklingly witty, this comprehensive volume of Angela Carter’s journalism is the most down-to-earth and entertaining companion to latter twentieth-century thought you’ll ever need.

Angela Carter

Helen Simpson

Fairy tales reimagined for feminist times

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

Magnificent set pieces of fastidious sensuality

She can glide from ancient to modern, from darkness to luminosity, from depravity to comedy without any hint of strain and without losing the elusive power of the original tales

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, these things that are sitting at the back of the nursery shelves? 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.’ And we all went: ‘Oh my gosh, she’s right—you can blow things up with these!’

A wonderfully written book, ironical, cerebral, elegant . . . distinguished by bold, inflected language and ornate, indeed often bloody, imagery

The Bloody Chamber's interweaving of retold fairy tales demonstrates Angela Carter's narrative gift at its most mocking and seductive

Angela Carter has extended the life and richness of the fable form itself partly through language that is both pellucid and sensual, but chiefly through imagination of such Ariel reach that she can glide from ancient to modern, from darkness to luminosity, from depravity to comedy without any hint of strain and without losing the elusive power of the original tales

Discover Angela Carter's classic feminist retelling of favourite fairy tales woven in seductive, luminous storytelling. 
 
Beauty is turned into a Beast, Little Red Riding’s grandmother is stoned to death as a witch and, in the title story, a beautiful young pianist is swept into the world of a rich and sinister aristocrat, a man whose previous three wives have all died in mysterious circumstances. 
 
From familiar fairy tales and legends – Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots, Beauty and the Beast, vampires and werewolves – Angela Carter has created an absorbing collection of dark, sensual, fantastic stories. 
 
'Magnificent set pieces of fastidious sensuality' Ian McEwan 
 
'A quirky, original, and baroque stylist' Margaret Atwood 
 
With an introduction from award-winning short story writer Helen Simpson

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

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Angela Carter

Praise for The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

Fairy tales reimagined for feminist times

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 hea ...

Magnificent set pieces of fastidious sensuality

Fairy tales reimagined for feminist times

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 hea ...

Magnificent set pieces of fastidious sensuality

Fairy tales reimagined for feminist times

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 hea ...

Magnificent set pieces of fastidious sensuality

Books by Angela Carter

Articles featuring Angela Carter

12 short story collections to sink into

Where to start with Angela Carter’s books

What to read after The Handmaid’s Tale

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