Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories by Angela Carter

From early reflections on jazz and Japan, through vigorous refashionings of vampires and werewolves, to stunning snapshots of reallife outcasts and the glorious but tainted world of "the rich and famous," this complete collection of Angela Carter's short stories gathers together four published books -- Fireworks, The Bloody Chamber, Black Venus, American Ghosts and Old World Wonders -- with her early work and uncollected stories. Angela Carter's major preoccupations -- violence in the wild and at home; fairy stories, ancient and new; magic, fabulous and quotidian; the frailty and mystery of the flesh and the strength of the spirit -- are all examined in startling relief. Among the treasures of this masterly collection: a young Lizzie Borden visits the circus; a pianist makes a Faustian pact in a flyblown Southern brothel; an earnest student is taken on a gothic ride through the ambiguous residue of Hollywood's golden age; Alice is transmuted by a crazed fruit-grower in Prague; and Mary