Product Description

From reflections on jazz and Japan through vigorous refashionings of classic fairy tales to stunning snapshots of modern life in all its tawdry glory, Burning Your Boats charts the evolution of Angela Carter's marvelous magic vision in a volume that assembles her considerable legacy of short fiction, including early and previously unpublished stories.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #102843 in Books
• Published on: 1997-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780140255287
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Amazon.com Review
"Baudelaire, Poe, Dream-Shakespeare, Hollywood, panto, fairy tale: [Angela] Carter wears her influences openly, for she is their deconstructionist, their saboteur." So writes Salman Rushdie in his introduction to this essential dark fantasy collection, the complete stories (1962-1993) of a master of perfervid prose, dark eroticism, northern Gothic exuberance (think Isak Dinesen), and Grand Guignol imagery. (You may be familiar with Neil Jordan's movie The Company of Wolves, based on one of Carter's tales.) As the New York Times writes, "There is an archaic cruel streak in many of these stories. Violence is always a possibility; beauty and courage and passion may prevail, but the weak and the timid go to the wall. In this, Angela Carter is true to the material that inspired her. After all, one reason the old fairy tales have survived for hundreds of years is that they do not try to disguise what the world is really like."

From Publishers Weekly
The late Angela Carter, better known as a novelist (Wise Children), wrote stories throughout her all-too-brief career, and they are all here, handsomely and perceptively introduced by Salman Rushdie, who was an old friend. These are not at all conventional stories that glimpse moments in contemporary life.They are tales, legends, variations on mythic themes, sparked by writing of great vitality, color and inventiveness, and a deeply macabre imagination. Carter's favorite themes mingle love and death. She cherishes dark forests, winter sunsets, wolves and werewolves, bloody murder, hunters, the cruel, rich husbands of maidens condemned to death. But she also has a ribald, extremely contemporary sense of humor that keeps glancing through the dark mists. Thus John Ford's Jacobean melodrama 'Tis a Pity She's a Whore resurfaces as the script for a movie directed by a 20th-century namesake; a Ph.D. candidate meets his subject's widow, someone very much like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard; and Britain's immortal pantomime characters get a hilarious going-over for their psychosexual significance. There are variations on Lizzie Borden, on the childhood of Edgar Allan Poe and several on Little Red Riding Hood, who gets the better of the Big Bad Wolf in at least two of them (Carter was an ardent but scarcely PC feminist). This is not a collection to be read at a sitting; the stories' jolting intensity makes them indigestible in large doses. But for readers who respond to an antic fancy dressed in highly charged prose, they are a generous treat.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
Historical events and personages viewed as in a distorting mirror, and beasts of prey endangered by encounters with their chosen quarry, are representative of the charmingly deranged fiction of the late Carter (194093). Carter's impertinent revisions of cherished conventions and beloved traditional stories do not elicit mild or neutral reactions from readers. As her friend Salman Rushdie suggests in his warm introduction to this rich collection of 42 stories (spanning the years 196293), one is either pleasurably seduced by her languorous imagery and overripe vocabulary, or made slightly ill by her intemperate romantic sensuality: you love her or you hate her. Even those attuned to Carter's perfervid imagination will have to pick and choose their way through a minefield of knotty prose and naughtier conceits, from several decidedly precious early tales through the contents of her acclaimed story volumes (such as The Bloody Chamber and Saints and Strangers) to a final three uncollected pieces that are even more hothouse-baroque than her usual work. If you can bypass the gamy contes cruels that show Carter at her worst, there's much to enjoy in her wry feminist response to the smug mandates of sexism, racism . . . come to think of it, most -isms. ``The Bloody Chamber'' amusingly reinvents the Bluebeard legend, featuring a virginal bride reluctant to become yet another passive victim; ``The Fall River Axe Murders'' examines Lizzie Borden from a sardonic female perspective; ``Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night's Dream'' retells Shakespeare's comedy from the viewpoint of the changeling child for whom fairy rulers Oberon and Titania contend. And in the amazing ``Our Lady of the Massacre,'' Carter employs the familiar narrative of (American) Indian captivity to create in a mere 14 pages a brilliantly compact near-novella. A book of wonders, then, even if too cloying for some tastes- -and a welcome occasion for reassessing the work of one of the most unusual writers of recent emergence. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

Buyer Beware
Be aware that Carter's excellent story of Lizzie Bordenis edited in this editon. The fabulou8s dinner scene, described in great detail in other editons of this story has been deleted from this version. E. Hobbs

Stunning
I was first introduced to Carter in my women's lit class, with "The Company of Wolves," (which still stands as my favorite Carter story). I was shocked that I had never read any of her writing before. A few days later, I went and ordered "Burning your Boats." I haven't been disappointed.

Regardless of whether I enjoy the story (and I must admit, I haven't enjoyed all of them), I cannot help but be blown away by her writing. It literally takes my breath away. She is one of the only authors that has this effect on me. Her retellings of fairy tales leave me in awe.

The more of her I read, the more obsessed I become. She is truly an amazing writer. I constantly ask myself how anyone can be so talented. I just don't understand it. Her writing is nothing short of stunning.

A fine collection.
This collection of Carter's work showcases her unique genius handsomely. Her interesting reworkings of popular myths and tales (see also her shorter collection, "The Bloody Chamber") are classics not to be missed, and this text provides one-stop shopping to get her body of short stories in a portable size. The tight, half-creepy, half-sexy, vaguely nihilistic narratives are rich and textured, and are the perfect length for very grown-up bedtime stories.