( Read more... )

'I led her to the bed and, in the variegated shadows, penetrated her sighing flesh, which was as chill as that of a mermaid or of the marmoreal water-maiden in her own garden. I was aware of a curiously attenuated response, as if she were feeling my caresses through a veil, and you must realize that all this time I was perfectly well aware she was ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

( Read more... )

( Read more... )

'Although [Sade] documented his sexual fantasies with an unequalled diligence, and these fantasies delight in the grisliest tortures (even if, in the context of his fictions, he creates an inverted ethical superstructure to legitimise these cruelties) his own sexual practice in life remains relatively obscure. From the evidence of the two court ( Read more... )

I picked up this novel because of an article by Neil Gaiman on the importance of fairy tales in which he links it to Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" and Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist, both of which I'd recently read. (Or reread, in the case of Rossetti's poem.) A couple three years ago I was blown away by Carter's collection of reimagined ( Read more... )

She felt her outlines waver; she felt herself trapped forever in the reflection of Walser's eyes. For one moment, just one moment, Fevvers suffered the worst crisis of her life. 'Am I fact? Or am I fiction? Am I what I know I am? Or am I what he thinks I am ( Read more... )