Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) was a key figure in the
Surrealist movement and an artist of remarkable individuality. She
was born to a wealthy English family in 1917, expelled from two
convents as a girl, and presented to the king's court in 1933. Four
years later, she ran off with Max Ernst and became a darling of the
art world in Paris: serving guests hair omelets at one party,
arriving naked to another. After Ernst was taken from their home to
a Nazi internment camp in 1940, Carrington fled France. Nearly mad
with grief and terror, she was thrown into a lunatic asylum in
Spain, and, after escaping, married a Mexican diplomat, fleeing
Europe for New York City then Mexico City, where she lived for the
rest of her life. Throughout her long career, Carrington published
novels, stories, and plays, in addition to making paintings,
sculptures, and tapestries.
Kathryn Davis has received the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize,
the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and
Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the author of many
novels, including Labrador, The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, Hell, The
Walking Tour, The Thin Place, Versailles, Duplex, and Silk Road. In
2006 she received the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. She
is the senior fiction writer in the MFA program at Washington
University in St. Louis.
“In both her prose and her visual art, Carrington dissolves the
borders between human and inhuman, fantasy and reality, death and
life. In The Complete Stories we meet a mad queen who uses
squirming live sponges to wash herself; a corpse that casts a
circle of light in the forest; and a horse-woman who lives among
plants and animals because humans won't accept her hybrid state.
Whenever Carrington's heroines are forced to pledge allegiance,
they always choose the company of beasts.” —Joy Press, Los Angeles
Times
“This is the best description of what it feels like to read her
work: In the middle of the fluffy fairy tale, something bristles,
something unpleasantly familiar, something human and frightening.”
—Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Book Review
“This definitive collection of Carrington's short fiction is a
treasure and a gift to the world. A stunning achievement.” —Jeff
VanderMeer
“Leonora Carrington has unswervingly followed the intensity of her
own particular vision and way of being. . . . Her work bristles
with a fierce, unconventional brand of feminism; anger gives it its
final edge of irony and power.” —Angela Carter
“Her delirious fantasy reveals to us a little of the secret magic
of her paintings.” —Luis Buñuel
“The writing is as neat, dry and witty as the content is wild,
woolly and portentous.” —The Times Literary Supplement
“Kathryn Davis's wonderful introduction to this complete collection
(published in conjunction with the centennial of Carrington's
birth) is a satisfying piece on its own, delightedly preparing the
reader for a writer bestowed with a satisfying mix of the most
wicked yet tender of visions.” —Entropy
“Carrington's stories are optimistic and nihilistic, beautiful and
grotesque, tender and cruel. She never contented herself with
something simple or trite, a philosophy of life that can be
shortened and simplified and put in a fortune cookie.” —Sheila
Heti
“Her protagonists speak to gods, monsters, parents, and strangers
in the same fearlessly ironic voice. Irrational or horrible things
happen to people in these stories just as they do in fairy tales,
dreams, the Bible, and real life. Intending to destroy dualistic
viewpoints, Carrington offers no glib moral judgments.” —The
Village Voice
“Her stories are vivid, funny and surprisingly fresh . . .
[combining] satire with surrealist situations to deftly mock the
pomposity of organized religion, sexual repression or the endless
forms of bureaucratic hypocrisy and ineptitude.” —The New York
Times
“A menagerie of eccentric humans, bloodthirsty talking animals, and
hybrid creatures is on display in her fantastic, and fantastical,
collection of stories.” —Publishers Weekly
“The Complete Stories and Down Below are both remarkable books;
read together they are almost overwhelming. The Carrington
centennial should stand as one of the great literary events of
2017. I know that I will be pressing these books on friends,
family, and acquaintances for years to come.” —Tor.com
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
