Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3295 in Books
• Published on: 1998-01-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

Review
'Magnificent set pieces of fastidious sensuality' Ian McEwan 'Angela Carter has extended the life and richness of the fable form itself partly through language that is both pellucid and sensual, but chiefly through imagination of such Ariel reach that 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's interweaving of retold fairy tales demonstrates Angela Carter's narrative gift at its most mocking and seductive' Observer 'Extraordinary and beautiful' Peter Redgrove

Carter relates traditional fairy tales through her own unique perspective. The mind of the modern feminist unravels the mysteries of the subconscious and its related symbolism. (Kirkus UK)

From the Publisher
'One of the century's greatest writers' Sunday Times

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 Liewellyn 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

Customer Reviews

Bloody Poor
Not sure someone who uses a thesaurus so liberally can be classed a great writer.

Rewriting fairytales is easy, as Carter said often in interviews. The 'latent' sexual and violent content is inherent in all the stories she reappropriates. Her art is merely to bring it to the fore: she is like a waitress delivering the chef's cuisine.

Pretentious and dull
I never found myself impressed by Carters writing technique. She writes in a very long winded, self-indulgent way often making the reader feel lost and disengage with her stories altogether. I personally find her rambling stories unimaginative in the way they all seem to portray males as perverted and evil for example. She often attempts to shock the reader by the use of vulgar imagery and though she does succeed in this, i simply cannot understand how this is meant to endear readers into her stories . I also question the format of short stories, they do not give the reader a chance to explore the characters and therefore make it difficult to 'get into' any of her stories. I honestly do not understand why the book is so popular as I found it exceptionally painful and dull to read with her long and overcomplicated sentences. In my mind her pretentious style is used to mask her otherwise unimaginative versions of fairy stories that all portray similar themes of feminism.

The Jewel of my Library
Not for nothing is Angela Carter my favourite author. She was first recommended to me when I was a callow young lass of 17. But it took me a year or two more before I finally got a taste of her work, when we studied one of the stories in this collection (the Werewolf) for a university module.

I was entranced from the very first sentence "It is a northern country; they have cold weather, they have cold hearts." Carter's baroque prose is often akin to lying on velvet and drinking pearls, or sometimes like scraping scraps of bloodied meat from a bone. Dense and flavoursome, her narrative style seems to spring directly from the fantastical worlds it conveys.

The stories here are retellings of familiar (and some less familiar) fairytales. In one sense, they are modernised, but it would perhaps be more correct to say that they in fact strip away the sanitising and tinkering of centuries to get back to the dark, psychological undertones of the stories in their original form.

Wonderfully evocative, these fairytales are certainly not for children, and I can guarantee that you'll never be able to read Little Red Riding Hood or Beauty and the Beast in quite the same way again.