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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Features

The much-missed vitality of Angela Carter

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What to read after The Handmaid’s Tale

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

A special edition of the feminist cult classic

This is Angela Carter's classic feminist retelling of favourite fairy tales woven in seductive, luminous storytelling.

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

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.

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

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

Wise Children

Wise Children is Angela Carter's best book. It deserves many prizes and, better than that, the affection of generations of readers

A funny, funny book, Wise Children is even better than Nights at the Circus. It deserves all the bouquets, diamonds and stage-door Johnnies it can get

Wonderful writing...there is not much fiction around that is as good as this

Delightful...this is rich prose which demands thought. It's also wickedly funny and a great read

Quite brilliant in every sense of the word

I know it in my ancient water, that something will happen today... 
 
Today is the 75th birthday of identical twin sisters, Dora and Nora. And on this day their story begins, a richly comic tale of the tangled fortunes of two theatrical families, the Hazards and the Chances. It is in fact, the 23rd April, Shakespeare’s birthday and as Dora’s story unfurls, over the course of a whole century, it is populated with as many sets of twins, mistaken identities and unlikely coincidences as any Shakespeare comedy. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ALI SMITH 
 
'It is wise, bawdy, vulgar, eloquent and very, very funny... And the writing is often breathtakingly lyrical... A masterpiece. Please share' Guardian

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.

Collected Dramatic Works

The Curious Room

Angela Carter's startling and inventive collected dramatic works

The Curious Room brims with life...Fear, desire and mischievous wonder blend to make her work irresistible.

Carter knew all about making images work in theatre. The proof is here, on the printed page...One of the pleasures of this book is watching a writer's imagination translate itself into visual and aural effects. We're allowed backstage, to peep at the wonderous machines of illusion.

Angela Carter was born in 1940. She read English at Bristol University, and from 1976-8 was a fellow in Creative Writing at Sheffield University. She lived in Japan, the United States and Australia. Her first novel, Shadow Dance, was published in 1965, followed by The Magic Toyshop (1967, John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Several Perceptions (1968), Love (1971), The Passion of New Eve (1977), Nights at the Circus (1984, James Tait Black Memorial Prize) and Wise Children (1991). Three collections of her short stories have been published, Fireworks (1974) The Bloody Chamber (1979, Cheltenham Festival of Literature Award) and American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (1993). She was author of The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (1979) and two collections of journalism, Nothing Sacred and Expletives Deleted (1992). She died in February 1992.

The Vintage Collected Edition of Angela Carter's works continues with THE CURIOUS ROOM, which contains her dramatic writings, including several previously unpublished plays and screenplays. THE CURIOUS ROOM includes a radio play about the demented Victorian painter and parricide Richard Dadd; reworkings of Puss in Boots and the Dracula story; a draft for an opera of Virginia Woolf's ORLANDO, as well as the film scripts of THE MAGIC TOYSHOP and THE COMPANY OF WOLVES. Revealing many of the enthusiasms and concerns which ignited Carter's fiction. THE CURIOUS ROOM is full of magnificent and startling new material, charged with the range and power of Carter's imagination and inventiveness.

Collected Short Stories

Burning Your Boats

The essential collection of short stories by a daring, joyful writer

Burning Your Boats brings together her four volumes of short fiction...They testify to Carter's range, daring and her invention. An important book

A writer cultured in every sense of the word, whose syntax is ever artful, whose vocabulary is zestfully arcane, whose erudition manifests itself in her work in a shimmering play of parody and illusion. She was one of the century's best writers, and her stories are among her finest works

This is the voice the young generation are flocking to read and study, and these marvellous collected stories wonderfully explain why no pigeon-hole could ever contain her creator. When you read all the stories collected together, a sense of joy erupts that such writing can exist

World-class stories, woven from their author's high humour, glittering imagination, vital erudition and warm intelligence

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SALMAN RUSHDIE 
 
As well as her eight novels, Angela Carter published four wonderful collections of short stories during her lifetime, and contributed stories to several anthologies. The stories were scattered amongst different publishers, and a couple of the volumes are now out of print. In Burning your Boats they are gathered for the first time; this is a key collection and a major event for Angela Carter aficionados.

Selected Writings

Expletives Deleted

Extraordinary essays from one of the century's finest writers

She was a great writer and a great feminist, and will be read for illumination and entertainment for many years to come

She was and is more than a breath of fresh air in contemporary letters.She is a bloody hurricane when she is in the mood

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL MOORCOCK 
 
Angela Carter was one of the most important and influential writers of our time: a novelist of extraordinary power and a searching critic and essayist.This selection of her writing, which she made herself, covers more than a decade of her thought and ranges over a diversity of subjects giving a true measure of the wide focus of her interests: the brothers Grimm; William Burroughs; food writing, Elizbaeth David; British writing: American writing; sexuality, from Josephine Baker to the history of the corset; and appreciations of the work of Joyce and Christina Stead.

Bluebeard

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Angela Carter was born in Eastbourne in 1940. She wrote nine novels and numerous short stories, as well as non-fiction, radio plays, and the screenplay for Neil Jordan's 1984 movie The Company of Wolves, based on her story. She won numerous literary awards, travelled and taught widely in the UK and US. She was also writer in residence at several universities. She died in London in 1992.

'Curiosity is the most fleeting of pleasures; the moment is satisfied, it ceases to exist and it always proves very, very expensive.' 
 
Angela Carter's playful and subversive retellings of Charles Perrault's classic fairy tales conjure up a world of resourceful women, black-hearted villains, wily animals and incredible transformations. In these seven stories, bristling with frank, earthy humour and gothic imagination, nothing is as it seems. 
 
This book includes Bluebeard, Little Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots, The Sleeping Beauty of the Wood, Cinderella: or, The Glass Slipper, Ricky with the Tuft and The Foolish Wishes.

The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

'One of the most original, radical and stylish fiction writers of the twentieth century'

She belonged at the centre of the literature of her time

Angela Carter was born in 1940 of a Scottish father and Yorkshire mother. She read English at Bristol University, and after escaping an early marriage went to live in Japan for a number of years. She wrote nine novels, which blend fantasy, science fiction and gothic, and is often referred to as a writer of magic realism. She died in 1992. 
 
Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. She is the author of Free Love, Like, Hotel World, Other Stories and Other Stories, The Whole Story and Other Stories, The Accidental, Girl Meets Boy and The First Person and Other Stories.

Desiderio, an employee of the city under a bizarre reality attack from Doctor Hoffman's mysterious machines, has fallen in love with Albertina, the Doctor's daughter. But Albertina, a beautiful woman made of glass, seems only to appear to him in his dreams. Meeting on his adventures a host of cannibals, centaurs and acrobats, Desiderio must battle against unreality and the warping of time and space to be with her, as the Doctor reduces Desiderio's city to a chaotic state of emergency - one ridden with madness, crime and sexual excess. 
 
A satirical tale of magic and sex, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman is a dazzling quest for truth, love and identity.

Heroes and Villains

A modern fable, a post-apocalyptic romance, a gothic horror story; Angela Carter's genre-defying fantasia Heroes and Villains includes an introduction by Robert Coover in Penguin Modern Classics. 
 
Sharp-eyed Marianne lives in a white tower made of steel and concrete with her father and the other Professors. Outside, where the land is thickly wooded and wild beasts roam, live the Barbarians, who raid and pillage in order to survive. Marianne is strictly forbidden to leave her civilized world but, fascinated by these savage outsiders, decides to escape. There, beyond the wire fences, she will discover a decaying paradise, encounter the tattooed Barbarian boy Jewel and go beyond the darkest limits of her imagination. Playful, sensuous, violent and gripping, Heroes and Villains is an ambiguous and deliriously rich blend of post-apocalyptic fiction, gothic fantasy, literary allusion and twisted romance. 
 
Angela Carter (1940-92) was born in Eastbourne and later evacuated to live with her grandmother in Yorkshire. She read English at Bristol University, and after escaping an early marriage went to live in Japan for a number of years. She wrote nine novels, which blend fantasy, science fiction and gothic, and is often referred to as a writer of magical realism. 
 
If you enjoyed Heroes and Villains, you might like Carter's The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 
 
'Angela Carter is a genius' 
Victoria Glendinning 
 
'An unashamed fantasist, a fabulist of daemonic energy' 
The Times

'An unashamed fantasist, a fabulist of daemonic energy'

Angela Carter was born in 1940 of a Scottish father and Yorkshire mother. She read English at Bristol University, and after escaping an early marriage went to live in Japan for a number of years. She wrote nine novels, which blend fantasy, science fiction and gothic, and is often referred to as a writer of magic realism. She died in 1992. 
 
Robert Lowell Coover (born February 4, 1932) is an American author and professor in the Literary Arts program at Brown University. He is one of America's pioneering postmodernists. Coover currently splits his time between the USA and London.

Sharp-eyed Marianne lives in a white tower made of steel and concrete with her father and the other Professors. Outside, where the land is thickly wooded and wild beasts roam, live the Barbarians, who raid and pillage in order to survive. Marianne is strictly forbidden to leave her civilized world but, fascinated by these savage outsiders, decides to escape. There, beyond the wire fences, she will discover a decaying paradise, encounter the tattooed Barbarian boy Jewel and go beyond the darkest limits of her imagination. 
 
Playful, sensuous, violent and gripping, Heroes and Villains is an ambiguous and deliriously rich blend of post-apocalyptic fiction, gothic fantasy, literary allusion and twisted romance.

The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault

A new edition of Angela Carter's wonderful translation of the most famous fairy tales, with a new introduction by Jack Zipes

Angela Carter (1940 - 1992) was an English novelist and journalist, known for her post-feminist magical realist and science fiction works. 
 
Jack David Zipes is a Professor of German at the University of Minnesota whose publications and lectures on fairy tales have transformed research on fairy tales and their linguistic roots and socialization function.

In eighteenth century France, Charles Perrault rescued from the oral tradition fairy tales that are known and loved even today by virtually all children in the West. Angela Carter came across Perrault's work and set out to adapt the stories for modern readers of English. In breathing new life into these classic fables, she produced versions that live on as classics in their own right, marked as much by her signature wit, irony, and subversiveness as they are by the qualities that have made them universally appealing for centuries.

Black Venus

Eight short works of fiction by one of Britain's greatest and most original writers.

Black Venus displays the superbly witchy Angela Carter at her best... Whatever her subject Miss Carter writes like a dream - sometimes a nightmare. And as the voices call out, the images blaze, one is saved from an excess of fantasy by earthy realism, a sudden bark of humour

The "radicalised" Carter tells her tales of terror ferociously, with black brilliance. Black Venus is shot with dazzling lightning. It is thunderous and magnetic; irresistible even when it seems most repellent

Earthy, bawdy and bizarre in turn, there is a fine intelligence at work here

She was one of the century's finest writers, and her stories are among her finest works

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.

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.

American Ghosts & Old World Wonders

The dazzling last collection of short fiction from Angela Carter

Shortly before her death Angela Carter was preparing this volume of short stories, one which does full justice to the glory of her imagination and the range of her talent. It is divided into distinct parts. The first comprises a group of stories inspired by America: Lizzie Borden visits a circus; a John Ford Western is spiced with the story of 'TIS PITY SHE'S A WHORE' and there is a wonderful Gothic extravaganza set in Hollywood. The second section - OLD WORLD WONDERS - draws on fairy tales (Cinderella), on the story of Mary Magdalene, on the folklore of pantomime, on ALICE IN WONDERLAND, an on medieval legend. These stories represent Angela Carter at her most acrobatic and dazzling: erudite, witty, sexy and enthralling. A book to delight her many, many fans.

A Souvenir of Japan

Angela Carter

Nights at the Circus is a glorious enchantment. But an enchantment which is rooted in an earthy, rich and powerful language...It is a spell-binding achievement

A glorious piece of work, a set-piece studded with set-pieces. The narrative has a splendid ripe momentum, and each descriptive touch contributes a pang of vividness. By doing possible things impossibly well, the book achieves a major enchantment

A mistress-piece of sustained and weirdly wonderful Gothic that's both intensely amusing and also provocatively serious. This is a big, superlatively imagined novel

Is Sophie Fevvers, toast of Europe's capitals, part swan...or all fake? 
 
Courted by the Prince of Wales and painted by Toulouse-Lautrec, she is an aerialiste extraordinaire and star of 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. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SARAH WATERS 
 
**One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World** 
 
'A spellbinding achievement' Literary Review 
 
'Raunchy, raucous...a rich, turn of the 19th century world, which reeks of human and animal variety' The Times

Nights at the Circus

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Brief Encounters

Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics

Penguin Modern Classics

Vintage Quarterbound Classics

Dive into the depraved, delectable depths of weird fiction with nine books by nine pioneering female authors.

Angela Carter

Praise for Nights at the Circus

Nights at the Circus is a glorious enchantment. But an enchantment which is rooted in an earthy, rich and powerful language...It is a spell-binding achievement

A glorious piece of work, a set-piece studded with set-pieces. The narrative has a splendid ripe momentum, and each descriptive touch contributes a pang of vividness. By doing possible things impossibly well, the bo ...

A mistress-piece of sustained and weirdly wonderful Gothic that's both intensely amusing and also provocatively serious. This is a big, superlatively imagined novel

Nights at the Circus is a glorious enchantment. But an enchantment which is rooted in an earthy, rich and powerful language...It is a spell-binding achievement

A glorious piece of work, a set-piece studded with set-pieces. The narrative has a splendid ripe momentum, and each descriptive touch contributes a pang of vividness. By doing possible things impossibly well, the bo ...

A mistress-piece of sustained and weirdly wonderful Gothic that's both intensely amusing and also provocatively serious. This is a big, superlatively imagined novel

Nights at the Circus is a glorious enchantment. But an enchantment which is rooted in an earthy, rich and powerful language...It is a spell-binding achievement

A glorious piece of work, a set-piece studded with set-pieces. The narrative has a splendid ripe momentum, and each descriptive touch contributes a pang of vividness. By doing possible things impossibly well, the bo ...

A mistress-piece of sustained and weirdly wonderful Gothic that's both intensely amusing and also provocatively serious. This is a big, superlatively imagined novel

Books by Angela Carter

Series by Angela Carter

Brief Encounters

Articles featuring Angela Carter

12 short story collections to sink into

Where to start with Angela Carter’s books

The much-missed vitality of Angela Carter

What to read after The Handmaid’s Tale

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