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The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

Discover Angela Carter’s classic feminist retelling of favourite fairy tales interwoven by a master of seductive, luminous storytelling.

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

Featuring an introduction from award-winning short story writer Helen Simpson

Reviews

  • "Fairy tales reimagined for feminist times"

    Grazia

  • "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"

    Observer

  • "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 Times

  • "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!’"

    Daily Telegraph

More in this Series

About the Author

Angela Carter

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.

Angela Carter

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