The Bloody Chamber Wise Children Fireworks

An omnibus of works by the great British writer that showcases her hauntingly erotic fabulism and the subversive richness of her imagination. In The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter's famous collection of deeply unsettling stories inspired by fairy tales, we see a Beauty who turns into a Beast, Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother stoned as a werewolf, and Bluebeard as a murderous, porn-addicted businessman. In the surreally delightful novel Wise Children, an elderly woman recounts the colorful life she and her identical twin sister led as vaudeville performers. And the early story collection Fireworks reveals Carter taking her first forays into the fantastical writing that was to become her unforgettable legacy. As critic Laura Miller has argued, "Most contemporary literary fiction with a touch of magic owes something to Angela Carter's trailblazing." This Everyman's Library omnibus gathers the best of Angela Carter in one astonishing volume.

‘I started to write short pieces when I was living in a room too small to write a novel in.’ So says Angela Carter of this collection, written during a period living in Toyko. These exotic, sensuous stories represent Carter’s first major achievement in the short story form. Lush imaginary forests, a murderous puppet show and an expressionistic vision of Japan: each one instantly conjures an atmosphere, dark and luminous in turn, and from the recognisably daring imagination of one of the great twentieth-century stylists.

In Brixton, Nora and Dora Chance – twin chorus girls born and bred south of the river – are celebrating their 75th birthday. Over the river in Chelsea, their father and greatest actor of his generation Melchior Hazard turns 100 on the same day. As does his twin brother Peregrine. If, in fact, he's still alive. And if, in truth, Melchior is their real father after all... Wise Children is adapted for the stage from Angela Carter's last novel about a theatrical family living in South London. It centres around twin chorus girls, Nora and Dora Chance, whose lives are brimming with mystery, illegitimacy and scandal. Dora narrates the story as her older self, looking back on a tumultuous life, throughout which she and her sister have loved to sing and dance. A big, bawdy tangle of theatrical joy and heartbreak, Wise Children is a celebration of show business, family, forgiveness and hope. Expect show girls and Shakespeare, sex and scandal, music, mischief and mistaken identity – and butterflies by the thousand.

For the 75th anniversary of her birth, a Deluxe Edition of the master of the literary supernatural’s most celebrated book—featuring a new introduction by Kelly Link Angela Carter was a storytelling sorceress, the literary godmother of Neil Gaiman, David Mitchell, Audrey Niffenegger, J. K. Rowling, Kelly Link, and other contemporary masters of supernatural fiction. In her masterpiece, The Bloody Chamber—which includes the story that is the basis of Neil Jordan’s 1984 movie The Company of Wolves—she spins subversively dark and sensual versions of familiar fairy tales and legends like “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Bluebeard,” “Puss in Boots,” and “Beauty and the Beast,” giving them exhilarating new life in a style steeped in the romantic trappings of the gothic tradition. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

6In this collection of nine short stories, Carter pinpoints the symbolism of city streets and weaves allegories around forests and jungles of strange and erotic landscapes of the imagination.

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.

Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir of life with her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, is a vital eyewitness account of Stalin’s Soviet Union and one of the most moving testaments to the value of literature and imaginative freedom ever written. In 1933, Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) wrote a satiric poem about Joseph Stalin, and the result of his defiance was arrest, interrogation, and exile, followed by re-arrest and death in a transit camp of the Siberian gulag in 1938. Osip’s wife, Nadezhda (1899–1980), loyally accompanied him into exile in the Urals and later worked courageously to rescue the manuscripts of his poems and to discover the truth about his death. Hope Against Hope is her harrowing account of their last years together and a window into Stalin’s persecution of Russia’s literary intelligentsia in the 1930s and beyond. But it is also a profoundly inspiring love story that relates their determination to keep both love and art alive in the most desperate circumstances. After years of circulating privately in the Soviet Union, Hope Against Hope was smuggled out and published in the West in 1970 and has since achieved the status of a classic, not only for its essential testimony to a dramatic period of history but also for the enduring brilliance of Mandelstam’s writing. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

Fitzgerald's masterpiece--the quintessential Jazz Age novel--now in a hardcover Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics edition For generations of enthralled readers, F. Scott Fitzgerald's mysterious millionaire, Jay Gatsby, has come to embody all the glamour and decadence of the Roaring Twenties. Gatsby emerges as if from nowhere, evading questions about his past and throwing dazzling parties sparkling with champagne and jazz at his luxurious Long Island mansion. Nick Carraway, a young man who has moved in next door, is fascinated by his oddly detached neighbor, and by his discovery that Gatsby is motivated by a single-minded quest to regain his long-lost love, Daisy Buchanan. Nick finds something both appalling and appealing about the intensity of Gatsby's ambition to reinvent himself. But Daisy and her wealthy husband are cynical and careless people, and as Gatsby's dream collides with reality, Nick is witness to the violence and tragedy that result. The Great Gatsby's remarkable staying power, nearly a century after its publication, is owed both to the lyrical freshness of its storytelling and to the way that it illuminates the hollow core of the glittering American dream. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.