The Skeleton's Holiday

'Ring for your maid, and when she comes in we'll pounce upon her and tear off her face. I'll wear her face tonight instead of mine.' 
 
These dreamlike, carnivalesque fables by one of the leading lights of the Surrealist movement are masterpieces of invention and grand-guignol humour. 
 
Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

The Hearing Trumpet

<a href="https://shop.penguin.co.uk/collections/book-bundles-modern-classics/?&amp;utm_source=Penguin.co.uk&amp;utm_medium=Linked_text&amp;utm_campaign=Penguin_Modern_Classics_Series_26_06">Choose 3 timeless classics for only £21 over on the Penguin Shop</a>

'Reading The Hearing Trumpet liberates us from the miserable reality of our days' Luis Buñuel

This book is so inspiring...I love its freedom, its humour and how it invents its own laws. What specifically do I take from her? Her wig

Leonora Carrington was a British born Surrealist painter and writer who has been described, alongside people such as Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro, as one of the leading lights of the Surrealist movement. Born in Lancashire in 1917 to a strict Catholic family she first came into contact with surrealism through her lover, Surrealist painter Max Ernst, before moving to Mexico in 1942. The Hearing Trumpet, her most famous piece of writing, was first published in France in 1974. 
 
 
Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and she lives in Cambridge. She is the author of Free Love and Other Stories, Like,Other Stories and Other Stories, Hotel World, The Whole Story and Other Stories, The Accidental,Girl Meets Boy, The First Person and Other Stories, There but for the, Artful, How to be both, and Public library and other stories. Hotel World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize and The Accidental was shortlisted for the Man Booker and the Orange Prize. How to be both won the Baileys Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Costa Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker and the Folio Prize.

The Hearing Trumpet is the story of 92-year-old Marian Leatherby, who is given the gift of a hearing trumpet only to discover that what her family is saying is that she is to be committed to an institution. But this is an institution where the buildings are shaped like birthday cakes and igloos, where the Winking Abbess and the Queen Bee reign, and where the gateway to the underworld is open. It is also the scene of a mysterious murder. Occult twin to Alice in Wonderland, The Hearing Trumpet is a classic of fantastic literature that has been translated and celebrated throughout the world.

Leonora Carrington

Carrington's stories are optimistic and nihilistic, beautiful and grotesque, tender and cruel... Her stories make brambles out of my brain

A classic... I remember reading [Down Below] on a park bench in summer of 2020 and thinking: this is what is happening to me. Also, it contains the closest approximation you can get to a diagram of God’s perineum

In 1940, Leonora Carrington - a twenty-two-year-old British-born Surrealist artist - was persuaded to flee France and the advancing German army for Spain. Already suffering from a psychotic break occasioned by the arrest of her lover by the Nazi authorities, she was soon confined to a mental institution, where she was subjected to sadistic treatment under the guise of medical care. In her memoir, Down Below, she describes her experiences with an anthropologist's precision and an artist's sense of the fantastic. 
 
This volume also includes a selection of Carrington's best stories from across her lifetime, functioning as companion pieces to her surrealist-inflected non-fiction. They include 'The Debutante', in which a young woman, wishing to avoid a ball in her honour, swaps places with a hyena; 'White Rabbits', which sees a friendly neighbour come by to ask for spare decomposing meat; and 'My Flannel Knickers', in which a woman has sainthood forced upon her.

Leonora Carrington

Praise for White Rabbits/Down Below

Carrington's stories are optimistic and nihilistic, beautiful and grotesque, tender and cruel... Her stories make brambles out of my brain

A classic... I remember reading [Down Below] on a park bench in summer of 2020 and thinking: this is what is happening to me. Also, it contains the closest approximation you can get to a diagram of God’s peri ...

Books by Leonora Carrington

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter