Burning Your Boats : The Complete Short Stories - Softcover

Angela Carter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099592916 ISBN 13: 9780099592914

Publisher: Vintage Books, 2010

Synopsis

This title comes 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.

About this title

Review:

"Baudelaire, Poe, Dream-Shakespeare, Hollywood, panto, fairy tale: [Angela] Carter wears her influences openly, for she is their deconstructionist, their saboteur." So writes Salman Rushdie in his introduction to this essential dark fantasy collection, the complete stories (1962-1993) of a master of perfervid prose, dark eroticism, northern Gothic exuberance (think Isak Dinesen), and Grand Guignol imagery. (You may be familiar with Neil Jordan's movie The Company of Wolves, based on one of Carter's tales.) As the New York Times writes, "There is an archaic cruel streak in many of these stories. Violence is always a possibility; beauty and courage and passion may prevail, but the weak and the timid go to the wall. In this, Angela Carter is true to the material that inspired her. After all, one reason the old fairy tales have survived for hundreds of years is that they do not try to disguise what the world is really like."

About the Author:

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Books
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0099592916
• ISBN 13: 9780099592914
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 560