Black Venus
  • Published: 1 January 2011
  • ISBN: 9781409042143
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 144

Black Venus

Formats & editions
EBook
1 Jan 2011
Paperback
5 Jul 1996
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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.
  • Published: 1 January 2011
  • ISBN: 9781409042143
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 144
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About the author

Angela Carter

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.

portrait photo of Angela Carter

Also by Angela Carter

The Angela Carter BBC Radio Drama Collection
The Bloody Chamber, Wise Children, Fireworks
Fireworks
The Curious Room
Shaking A Leg
The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault
Heroes and Villains
See all

Praise for Black Venus

Black Venus displays the superbly witchy Angela Carter at her best... 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

The "radicalised" Carter tells her tales of terror ferociously, with black brilliance. Black Venus is shot with dazzling lightning. It is thunderous and magnetic; irresistible even when it seems most repellent

Courrier Mail

Earthy, bawdy and bizarre in turn, there is a fine intelligence at work here

Daily Telegraph

She was one of the century's finest writers, and her stories are among her finest works

Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Sunday Times

Angela Carter has language at her fingertips

New Statesman