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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 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.

Angela Carter

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