Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction

From the master of the literary supernatural and author of The Bloody Chamber, her acclaimed novel about the exploits of a circus performer who is part-woman, part-swan

Sophi Fevvers--the toast of Europe's capitals, courted by the Prince of Wales, painted by Toulouse-Lautrec--is an aerialiste extraordinaire, star of Colonel Kearney's circus. She is also part woman, part swan. Jack Walser, an American journalist, is on a quest to discover Fevvers's true identity: Is she part swan or all fake?...

In Elizabeth Jolley's "The Last Crop," a seemingly guileless woman cons a man out of his land. In Leonora Carrinton's "The Debutante," a young girl sends a hyena to her coming-out ball, with disastrous results. The title character in Frances Towers's "Violet" uses her talent for witchcraft with wicked intention. Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl" faces a litany of her mother's strictures and admonishments, and Suniti Namjoshi's bittersweet fables suggest that nothing a woman does will ever be really right. But whether these women are bad or good, evil or benign, guilty or innocent, calculating or...

"One day, Annabel saw the sun and moon in the sky at the same time. The sight filled her with a terror which entirely consumed her for she had no instinct for self-preservation if she was confronted by ambiguities."

Annabel and Lee are married; Lee and Buzz are brothers. A quirky threesome, they have set up a household on the fringes on university life in the late sixties. Their hermetic existence is filled with drugs, sex, alchohol, intensity, and madness; their relationships with one another are haunting and complex.

Carter's compelling tale carries echoes of Poe and Bronte into the...

The transformation of Desiderio's city into a mysterious kingdom is instantaneous: Hallucination flows with magical speed in every brain; avenues and plazas are suddenly as fertile as fairy-book forests. And the evil comes, too, as imaginary massacres fill the streets with blood, the dead return to question the living, and profound anxiety drives hundreds to suicide.

Behind it all stands Doctor Hoffman, whose gigantic generators crack the immutable surfaces of time and space and plunge civilization into a world without the chains - or structures - of reason. Only Desiderio, immune to...

One of our most imaginative and accomplished writers, Angela Carter left behind a dazzling array of work: essays, citicism, and fiction. But it is in her short stories that her extraordinary talents--as a fabulist, feminist, social critic, and weaver of tales--are most penetratingly evident. This volume presents Carter's considerable legacy of short fiction gathered from published books, and includes early and previously unpublished stories. From reflections on jazz and Japan, through vigorous refashionings of classic folklore and fairy tales, to stunning snapshots of modern life in all its...

From the master of the literary supernatural and author of The Bloody Chamber, a startling tale of the redemptive power of physical and emotional love

One night Melanie walks through the garden in her mother's wedding dress. The next morning her world is shattered. Forced to leave the comfortable home of her childhood, she is sent to London to live with relatives she has never met: Aunt Margaret, beautiful and speechless, and her brothers, Francie, whose graceful music belies his clumsy nature, and the volatile Finn, who kisses Melanie in the ruins of the...

No-one in the grip of Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN, with its mythic-minded hero and its highly sympathetic monster who reads Goethe and longs to be at peace with himself, can fail to notice how much more excellent the original is than all the adaptations, imitations and outright plagiarisms which have followed in its ample wake. In her first novel, written at the instigation of Lord Byron and published in 1818 (and revised in 1831), Mary Shelley produced English Romanticism's finest prose fiction.

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A collection of short stories which tear through the archives of cinema, of art and of the subconscious. A young Lizzie Borden visits the circus; a pianist makes a Faustian pact in a fly-blown Southern brothel; and a transfigured Mary Magdalene steps out of the canvases of Donatello and de la Tour.

"An absolutely unique voice...It would be an impertinence to call these eight delightful concoctions stories...A virtuoso Mendelssohn of fiction." -- The New York Times Book Review

Drawing on American history, literary legend, and folk tale, Angela Carter transports us to that shadowy country between fact and myth in this book of short stories.

Lizzy Borden, the spinster daughter of a glutton and a compulsive miser, ticks off the hours before a murder. An eighteenth-century whore and pickpocket who runs off to join the Indians tells her story in a voice of bawdy authenticity....