The Bloody Chamber, Wise Children, Fireworks

In The Bloody Chamber, Carter's famous collection of deeply unsettling stories inspired by fairy tales, a Beauty is turned into a Beast and Little Red Riding's grandmother is stoned to death as a witch; a young music student is swept off her feet in Paris by a middle-aged aristocrat and transported to his ancestral abode to re-enact the story of Bluebeard against a sumptuous fin de siècle background; a British soldier on a cycling holiday in Transylvania in the summer of 1914 finds himself the guest of an alluring female vampire. By contrast, in Wise Children, Carter's last novel), the comic, the bawdy and the life-enhancing prevail. An irrepressible elderly lady recalls the many colourful decades she and her sister spent as vaudeville performers - a tale as full of twins and mistaken identities as any plot of Shake- speare's. The early collection, Fireworks, reveals Carter taking her first forays into the fantastic writing that was to become her unforgettable legacy. The Everyman's Library omnibus gathers the best of Angela Carter in one astonishing volume. PRAISE “Angela Carter was a great writer. . . She was that rare thing, a real one-off, nothing like her on the planet . . . Her books unshackle us, toppling the statues of the pompous, demolishing the temples and commissariats of righteousness . . . They are without equal, and without rival . . . With Angela Carter’s death English literature has lost its high sorceress, its benevolent witch-queen, a burlesque artist of genius and antic grace.” —Salman Rushdie, THE NEW YORK TIMES “She writes a prose that lends itself to magnificent set pieces . . . dreams, myths, fairy tales, metamorphoses, the unruly unconscious, epic journeys, and a highly sensual celebration of sexuality in both its most joyous and darkest manifestations.” —Ian McEwan “She was, among other things, a quirky, original, and baroque stylist, a trait especially marked in The Bloody Chamber—her vocabulary a mix of finely tuned phrase, luscious adjective, witty aphorism, and hearty, up-theirs vulgarity.” —Margaret Atwood, THE OBSERVER “The Bloody Chamber is such an important book to me. Angela Carter, for me, is still the one who said: ‘You see these fairy stories? Actually, each one of them is a loaded gun. Each of them is a bomb. Watch: if you turn it right it will blow up.’” —Neil Gaiman, THE DAILY TELEGRAPH “[The Bloody Chamber] is her great book, the one that only she could have written . . . The strange things in those tales—the werewolves and snow maidens, the spider-hung caves and liquefying mirrors—are made to live again by means of a prose informed by the wonders of cinema and psychoanalysis and Symbolist poetry.” —from the Introduction by Joan Acocella