Burning your boats : the collected short stories

Burning your boats The collected short stories

Angela Carter, 1940-1992

Book - 1995

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FICTION/Carter, Angela
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1st Floor FICTION/Carter, Angela Checked In
Subjects
Manners and customs > Fiction.
Short stories.
Published
New York : H. Holt and Co c1995.
Language
English
Main Author
Angela Carter, 1940-1992 (-)
Item Description
"A John Macrae book."
Physical Description
462 p.
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN
9780140255287
9780805044621
  • The man who loved a double bass
  • A very, very great lady and her son at home
  • A Victorian fable
  • A souvenir of Japan
  • The executioner's beautiful daughter
  • The loves of Lady Purple
  • The smile of winter
  • Penetrating to the heart of the forest
  • Flesh and the mirror
  • Master
  • Reflections
  • Elegy for a freelance
  • The bloody chamber
  • The courtship of Mr. Lyon
  • The tiger's bride
  • Puss-in-boots
  • The Erl-king
  • The snow child
  • The lady of the house of love
  • The werewolf
  • The company of wolves
  • Wolf-Alice
  • Black Venus
  • The kiss
  • Our lady of the massacre
  • The cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe
  • Overture and incidental music for A midsummer night's dream
  • Peter and the wolf
  • The kitchen child
  • The Fall River axe murders
  • Lizzie's tiger
  • John Ford's 'Tis pity she's a whore
  • Gun for the devil
  • The merchant of shadows
  • The ghost ships
  • In Pantoland
  • Ashputtle or The mother's ghost
  • Alice in Prague or The curious room
  • Impressions: The Wrightsman Magdalene
  • The scarlet house
  • The snow pavilion
  • The quilt maker.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

PW called this collection of the late writer's gothic, colorful tales "a generous treat." (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Historical events and personages viewed as in a distorting mirror, and beasts of prey endangered by encounters with their chosen quarry, are representative of the charmingly deranged fiction of the late Carter (194093). Carter's impertinent revisions of cherished conventions and beloved traditional stories do not elicit mild or neutral reactions from readers. As her friend Salman Rushdie suggests in his warm introduction to this rich collection of 42 stories (spanning the years 196293), one is either pleasurably seduced by her languorous imagery and overripe vocabulary, or made slightly ill by her intemperate romantic sensuality: you love her or you hate her. Even those attuned to Carter's perfervid imagination will have to pick and choose their way through a minefield of knotty prose and naughtier conceits, from several decidedly precious early tales through the contents of her acclaimed story volumes (such as The Bloody Chamber and Saints and Strangers) to a final three uncollected pieces that are even more hothouse-baroque than her usual work. If you can bypass the gamy contes cruels that show Carter at her worst, there's much to enjoy in her wry feminist response to the smug mandates of sexism, racism . . . come to think of it, most -isms. ``The Bloody Chamber'' amusingly reinvents the Bluebeard legend, featuring a virginal bride reluctant to become yet another passive victim; ``The Fall River Axe Murders'' examines Lizzie Borden from a sardonic female perspective; ``Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night's Dream'' retells Shakespeare's comedy from the viewpoint of the changeling child for whom fairy rulers Oberon and Titania contend. And in the amazing ``Our Lady of the Massacre,'' Carter employs the familiar narrative of (American) Indian captivity to create in a mere 14 pages a brilliantly compact near-novella. A book of wonders, then, even if too cloying for some tastes- -and a welcome occasion for reassessing the work of one of the most unusual writers of recent emergence.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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