Product Description

In the short fiction of Angela Carter, the landmarks of reality disappear and give way to a landscape of riotous and uncensored sensibility. The city of Tokyo turns into a mirrored chamber reflecting the impossible longings of an exiled Englishwoman abandoned by her Japanese lover. An itinerant puppet show becomes a theatre of murderous lust. A walk through the forest ends in a nightmarish encounter with a gun-toting nymph and her hermaphrodite 'aunt'. Not simply a book of tales, Fireworks is a headlong plunge into an alternate universe, the unique creation of one of the most fertile, dark, irreverent, and baroquely beautiful imaginations in contemporary fiction.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #367378 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Review
'Fizzing with allegory, symbolism and surprises' - The Times

About the Author
Angela Carter was born in 1940. She read English at Bristol University and spent two years living in Japan. One of Britain's most original writers, Angela Carter was highly lauded for her novels, short stories and journalism. She died in February 1992.

Customer Reviews

Dazzling fireworks for the mind
A perfect title for this collection of odd, occasionally brilliant, dazzling and artificial tales. Some of the stories, set in rapacious South-American jungles and bitter Northern highlands, are instantly recognisable; this in Carter in the sensual and wicked fairy-tale mode she is perhaps most well-known for. Other tales set in Japan (recounting or perhaps inventing her 'Sadie Thompson-esque' experiences as a barmaid in the Orient, as she memorably described it elsewhere), are clever and introspective, full of the dreamy beauty, the absorbed masochism and downright strangeness of Japan. These tales grow on you slowly, like those Japanese paper flowers that open out underwater.
I think Fireworks illustrates better than any of her other story collections (excepting the glorious Bloody Chamber) just how fantastically inventive and rigorously intelligent Carter could be. Truly fireworks for the mind.

amazing.
This was my first (and as yet only) Carter read. What an outstanding introduction.
I had to read the whole book in one sitting. Incredible depth and wonderful twists and turns.
Such imagination-like fairytails for those of us who forgot to grow up, even though our bodies took the liberty.
The stories that thrilled me the most in terms of both aestethicism and substance were...
The executioner's beautiful daughter
The loves of Lady Purple
Penetrating to the heart of the forest

and my favourite....Reflections.

You could spend hours considering the text and all the things it could mean and all the things it represents...or just enjoy her crafted words.

Not a huge book. The stories are a good length...not too long to lose your interest and not too short as to cut you off just as you are getting into one. The narrative styles vary which keeps interest and she is playful in switching perspectives without warning. The stories also cover alot of ground geographically speaking which adds another level of richness.

I look forward to reading more.