Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories

Good stories in it. Some are disturbing, not for children. Came in good condition

This is a great book. I was taken back by her imagery. Her tells are striking and slightly unnerving. I recommend this book to any one who is tired of the usual narrative template. However those who are not open-minded about their ethics, morals, and sexuality, I caution about reading this book. She is a great weaver of words.

Good

A literature loving coworker raved about Angela Carter to the point where I had to dive into this tome.I became enamored with her wordsmithing, especially her sometimes contrasting style where Carter would introduce something rash or harsh, seemingly out of the blue, only to make it work within the narrative. It was as if to remind us that life itself can be devoid of rhythm and then find its way again like a temporary arrhythmia of the heart.Though in Salman Rushdie's wonderful introduction he states that Carter will be most remembered for her "The Bloody Chamber", I had issues with the protagonist's willingness to accept her fate and not fight for herself.And although I had to abandon at least three stories due to their structure and overall narrative, "A Victorian Fable", "Puss-in-Boots", and "In Pantoland", many of her tales proved both poignant and unsettling.For some reason, Carter seemed captivated by incest and underage lovers in several tales. At times, these may have been used as devices to showcase the dark side of paradise or to drive home the point that such taboos not only exists but thrives.The stories that resonated the most was the bleak and deep "The Scarlet House", "Elegy for a Freelance", and "Our Lady of the Massacre". Other potent narratives included, "The Executioners Beautiful Daughter", "The Erl-King", "The Lady of the House of Love", "Black Venus", "Overture and Incidental Music for 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'", "The Fall River Axe Murders", "Lizzie's Tiger", "John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore'", "Gun for the Devil", "The Merchant of Shadows", "The Snow Pavilion", and "The Quilt Maker".Carter's vocabulary is phenomenal, which allowed her to color many passages in exciting ways, and to create grand rhythms that bordered on the poetic. Sometimes, however, she did fall short, especially in her early tales, with sentences that seemed to grow weary and lose their footing.I enjoyed the overall arc of her writing and was thrilled to be introduced to a writer who had slipped by me until my wonderful coworker had made me aware.

If you like Flannery O’Conner, Edgar Allen Poe, and Mary Shelley, treat yourself to Angela Carter. The language is rich and the plots macabre. Perfect with a cup of chai and a fuzzy throw. I do wish the paper were a bit better quality , but it’s still a great read.

This woman uses her imagination like Jordan plays ball. She's always surprising, shocking, even. The interesting thing is that her stuff often gets described as "dark," yet most of the time, the good guys win. It's among my favorite works of literature.

Having enjoyed the novels of Angela Carter, I decided to give her short stories a try.Written in the same poetic style, these stories require reading very slowly in order to enoy the language. The dense sybolism requires that you think about each story for a while before proceeding to the next. In fact I would recommend reading only a few at sitting.Like any author of short stories, Carter wrote a few that failed to draw me in. But these failures only point to the stengths of those that did.

Narrated -- depends on the story