Discover Angela Carter

'Angela Carter's writing is pyrothechnic - fuelled with ideas, packed with images and spangling the night with her starry language' OBSERVER

'The boldest of English writers' LORNA SAGE

'A great writer . . . A real one-off' SALMAN RUSHDIE

'The scar drew her whole face sideways and even in profile, with the hideous thing turned away, her face was horribly lop-sided, skin, features and all, dragged away from the bone. She was a beautiful girl, a white and golden girl, like moonlight on daisies, a month ago.

And yet the men still hover around her, more out of curiosity than lust, and none more so than the wildly seductive, dangerous funny man, Honeybuzzard; lithe as a stick of liquorice, he is the demonic puppet master at the swirling centre of the tale.'

Carter's heady first novel introduces one of her most enigmatic characters. Honeybuzzard spends his nights scavenging the contents of abandoned buildings and his days seducing and tormenting lovers, enemies, and friends. He and his best friend Morris scour the backstreets of London, leaving behind a trail of destruction in the broken hearts and dashed hopes of those they love, manipulate, and ultimately discard.

Once upon a time fairy tales weren't meant just for children, and neither is Angela Carter's Book of Fairy Tales. This stunning collection contains lyrical tales, bloody tales and hilariously funny and ripely bawdy stories from countries all around the world- from the Arctic to Asia - and no dippy princesses or soppy fairies. Instead, we have pretty maids and old crones; crafty women and bad girls; enchantresses and midwives; rascal aunts and odd sisters.

This fabulous celebration of strong minds, low cunning, black arts and dirty tricks could only have been collected by the unique and much-missed Angela Carter. Illustrated throughout with original woodcuts.

'The boldest of English women writers' LORNA SAGE

'Her writing is pyrotechnic - fuelled with ideas, packed with images and spangling the night with her starry language' OBSERVER

'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

'This crazy world whirled around her, men and women dwarfed by toys and puppets, where even the birds are mechanical and the few human figures went masked . . . She was in the night once again, and the doll was herself.'

One night Melanie walks through the garden in her mother's wedding dress. The next morning her world is shattered. Forced to leave her rural home, she is sent to London to live with relatives she has never met: gentle Aunt Margaret, mute since her wedding day; and her brothers, Francie, whose graceful music belies his clumsy nature, and the volatile Finn. Brooding over all is Uncle Philip, who loves only the puppets he creates in his workshop, which are life-sized - and uncannily lifelike.

'Her Imagination was one of the most dazzling this century' MARINA WALKER, INDEPENDENT

'The way to Carter's visionary and lurid world' THE TIMES

'The darting, lyrical pen of Angela Carter, mistress of the erotic picaresque' KIRKUS REVIEWS

'I know nothing. I am a tabula rasa, a blank sheet of paper, an unhatched egg. I have not yet become a woman, although I possess a woman's shape. Not a woman, no: both more and less than a real woman. Now I am a being as mythic and monstrous as Mother herself . . . '

New York has become the City of Dreadful Night where dissolute Leilah performs a dance of chaos for Evelyn. But this young Englishman's fate lies in the arid desert, where a many-breasted fertility goddess will wield her scalpel to transform him into the new Eve. The Passion of New Eve is an extraordinary journey into the apocalyptic vision of the author Lorna Sage called 'The boldest of English women writers'.

'The tone is one of intellectual relish . . . rational . . . refined . . . witty' NEW STATESMAN

'Her work is funny, sexy, frightening and brutal' EDMUND GORDON, GUARDIAN

'Angela Carter liked to blur boundaries and break rules' GABY WOOD, INDEPENDENT

'Sexuality is power' - so says the Marquis de Sade, philosopher and pornographer extraordinaire. His virtuous Justine keeps to the rules laid down by men, her reward rape and humiliation; his Juliette, Justine's triumphantly monstrous antithesis, viciously exploits her sexuality. In a world where all tenderness is false, all beds are minefields.

But now Sade has met his match.

With invention and genius, Angela Carter takes on these outrageous figments of his extreme imagination, and transforms them into symbols of our time - the Hollywood sex goddesses, mothers and daughters, pornography, even the sacred shrines of sex and marriage lie devastatingly exposed before our eyes. Angela Carter delves into the viscera of our distorted sexuality and reveals a dazzling vision of love which admits neither of conqueror nor of conquered.

WINNER OF THE 1968 SOMERSET MAUGHAM PRIZE

'A picture of the Swinging Sixties without the romantic gloss of middle-aged memories' SUNDAY TIMES

'Angela Carter has language at her fingertips' NEW STATESMAN

' ... one of its most vivacious and compelling voices' INDEPENDENT

Centre stage in Angela Carter's unruly tale of the Flower Power Generation is Joseph - a decadent, disorientated rebel without a cause. A self-styled nihilist whose girlfriend has abandoned him, Joseph has decided to give up existing. But his concerned friends and neighbours have other plans.

In an effort to join in the spirit of protest which motivates his contemporaries, Joseph frees a badger from the local zoo; sends a turd airmail to the President of the United States; falls in love with the mother of his best friend; and, accompanied by the strains of an old man's violin, celebrates Christmas Eve in a bewildering state of sexual discovery.

But has he found the Meaning of Life?

'Wicked, wayward or otherwise, Carter's classic collection is a very erudite expression of girl power' MINA HOLLAND, GUARDIAN

'One of the century's greatest writers' SUNDAY TIMES

This bestselling collection of stories extols the female virtues of discontent, sexual disruptiveness and bad manners. These are subversive tales by Ama Ata Aidoo, Jane Bowles, Angela Carter, Colette, Bessie Head, Jamaica Kincaid and Katherine Mansfield among others. They all have one thing in common; the wish to restore adventuresses and revolutionaries to their rightful position as models for all women.

Reflecting the wide-ranging intelligence and deliciously anarchic taste of Angela Carter, some of these stories celebrate toughness and resilience, some of them low cunning: all of them are about not being nice.