The work of Angela Carter
I could go and individually recommend her novels and her smaller collections of short stories, but I think I'll just take the easy road and put forth my two favorite works by the incomparably poetic and horrifying Angela Carter.
Angela Carter's work draws heavily from fairy tales, Victorian customs, antique erotica, exoticism, and gothic literature. You may be familiar with the art film In the Company of Wolves, which is based off one of her short stories by the same name. Many of her fairy tale stories deal with the implicit themes of rape and incest as well as explore violent images of menarche and loss of virginity.
Currently my favorite of her novels has to be The Magic Toyshop. The first line of the story wows me every time. Honestly, the opening page of the still enraptures me even though I was younger than the heroine when I first read it. Her prose is always lush and vivid, though I'll admit the plot and meaning can get lost in her own wordplay fairly often.
Wikipedia says, "The Magic Toyshop, a modern British novel written by Angela Carter, was first published in 1967. The novel follows the development of the heroine, Melanie, as she becomes aware of herself, her environment, and her own sexuality. After the unexpected deaths of her parents, Melanie and her two siblings are moved to the care of her tyrannical uncle Philip, a bullish and eccentric toy maker, in South London."
But for a really wonderful introduction to the body of her work, Burning Your Boats: The Collected Stories is unbeatable. I found a copy in a used bookstore over the summer and reread it, wondering if it would still hold up. It did. The book is creepy, gorgeous, thoughtful, and contains "The Bloody Chamber", a feminist retelling of the Bluebeard tale that may be her most well-known short story.
Publisher's Weekly said, "The late Angela Carter, better known as a novelist (Wise Children), wrote stories throughout her all-too-brief career, and they are all here, handsomely and perceptively introduced by Salman Rushdie, who was an old friend. These are not at all conventional stories that glimpse moments in contemporary life. They are tales, legends, variations on mythic themes, sparked by writing of great vitality, color and inventiveness, and a deeply macabre imagination. Carter's favorite themes mingle love and death. She cherishes dark forests, winter sunsets, wolves and werewolves, bloody murder, hunters, the cruel, rich husbands of maidens condemned to death. But she also has a ribald, extremely contemporary sense of humor that keeps glancing through the dark mists. Thus John Ford's Jacobean melodrama 'Tis a Pity She's a Whore resurfaces as the script for a movie directed by a 20th-century namesake; a Ph.D. candidate meets his subject's widow, someone very much like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard; and Britain's immortal pantomime characters get a hilarious going-over for their psychosexual significance. There are variations on Lizzie Borden, on the childhood of Edgar Allan Poe and several on Little Red Riding Hood, who gets the better of the Big Bad Wolf in at least two of them (Carter was an ardent but scarcely PC feminist). This is not a collection to be read at a sitting; the stories' jolting intensity makes them indigestible in large doses. But for readers who respond to an antic fancy dressed in highly charged prose, they are a generous treat.
And I haven't even read her essays yet.
Angela Carter's work draws heavily from fairy tales, Victorian customs, antique erotica, exoticism, and gothic literature. You may be familiar with the art film In the Company of Wolves, which is based off one of her short stories by the same name. Many of her fairy tale stories deal with the implicit themes of rape and incest as well as explore violent images of menarche and loss of virginity.
Currently my favorite of her novels has to be The Magic Toyshop. The first line of the story wows me every time. Honestly, the opening page of the still enraptures me even though I was younger than the heroine when I first read it. Her prose is always lush and vivid, though I'll admit the plot and meaning can get lost in her own wordplay fairly often.
Wikipedia says, "The Magic Toyshop, a modern British novel written by Angela Carter, was first published in 1967. The novel follows the development of the heroine, Melanie, as she becomes aware of herself, her environment, and her own sexuality. After the unexpected deaths of her parents, Melanie and her two siblings are moved to the care of her tyrannical uncle Philip, a bullish and eccentric toy maker, in South London."
But for a really wonderful introduction to the body of her work, Burning Your Boats: The Collected Stories is unbeatable. I found a copy in a used bookstore over the summer and reread it, wondering if it would still hold up. It did. The book is creepy, gorgeous, thoughtful, and contains "The Bloody Chamber", a feminist retelling of the Bluebeard tale that may be her most well-known short story.
Publisher's Weekly said, "The late Angela Carter, better known as a novelist (Wise Children), wrote stories throughout her all-too-brief career, and they are all here, handsomely and perceptively introduced by Salman Rushdie, who was an old friend. These are not at all conventional stories that glimpse moments in contemporary life. They are tales, legends, variations on mythic themes, sparked by writing of great vitality, color and inventiveness, and a deeply macabre imagination. Carter's favorite themes mingle love and death. She cherishes dark forests, winter sunsets, wolves and werewolves, bloody murder, hunters, the cruel, rich husbands of maidens condemned to death. But she also has a ribald, extremely contemporary sense of humor that keeps glancing through the dark mists. Thus John Ford's Jacobean melodrama 'Tis a Pity She's a Whore resurfaces as the script for a movie directed by a 20th-century namesake; a Ph.D. candidate meets his subject's widow, someone very much like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard; and Britain's immortal pantomime characters get a hilarious going-over for their psychosexual significance. There are variations on Lizzie Borden, on the childhood of Edgar Allan Poe and several on Little Red Riding Hood, who gets the better of the Big Bad Wolf in at least two of them (Carter was an ardent but scarcely PC feminist). This is not a collection to be read at a sitting; the stories' jolting intensity makes them indigestible in large doses. But for readers who respond to an antic fancy dressed in highly charged prose, they are a generous treat.
And I haven't even read her essays yet.