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Black Venus

Angela Carter

$14.99

Paperback

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English
Vintage Classics
05 July 1996
Eight short works of fiction by one of Britain's greatest and most original writers.

Extraordinary and diverse people inhabit this rich, ripe, occasionally raucous collection of short stories. Some are based on real people - Jeanne Duval, Baudelaire's handsome and reluctant muse who never asked to be called the Black Venus, trapped in the terminal ennui of the poet's passion, snatching at a little lifesaving respectability against all odds...

Edgar Allen Poe, with his face of a actor, demonstrating in every thought and deed how right his friends were when they said 'No man is safe who drinks before breakfast.'

And some of these people are totally imaginary. Such as the seventeenth century whore, transported to Virginia for thieving, who turns into a good woman in spite of herself among the Indians, who have nothing worth stealing. And a girl, suckled by wolves, strange and indifferent as nature, who will not tolerate returning to humanity.

Angela Carter wonderfully mingles history, fiction, invention, literary criticism, high drama and low comedy in a glorious collection of stories as full of contradictions and surprises as life itself.
By:  
Imprint:   Vintage Classics
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Edition:   New edition
Dimensions:   Height: 197mm,  Width: 130mm,  Spine: 10mm
Weight:   110g
ISBN:   9780099480716
ISBN 10:   0099480719
Pages:   144
Publication Date:  
Recommended Age:   From 0 years
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Angela Carter was born in 1940. She lived in Japan, the United States and Australia. Her first novel, Shadow Dance, was published in 1965. Her next book, The Magic Toyshop, won the John Llewllyn Rhys Prize and the next, Several Perceptions, the Somerset Maugham Award. She died in February 1992.

Reviews for Black Venus

A collection of short stories: 'BLACK VENUS' displays the superbly witchy Angela Carter at her best. Her fabulous fables all speak for themselves in tones so commanding you feel this must be Baudelaire's mistress, ageing, remembering, still spreading syphilis, or Lizzie Borden restless in the fatal and hot Massachusetts summer. Whatever her subject Miss Carter writes like a dream - sometimes a nightmare. And as the voices call out, the images blaze, one is saved from an excess of fantasy by earthy realism, a sudden bark of humour' - SUNDAY TELEGRAPH.


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