The Bloody Chamber, Wise Children, Fireworks

“Angela Carter was a great writer. . . She was that rare thing, a real one-off, nothing like her on the planet . . . Her books unshackle us, toppling the statues of the pompous, demolishing the temples and commissariats of righteousness . . . They are without equal, and without rival . . . With Angela Carter’s death English literature has lost its high sorceress, its benevolent witch-queen, a burlesque artist of genius and antic grace.”
—Salman Rushdie, THE NEW YORK TIMES
 
“She writes a prose that lends itself to magnificent set pieces . . . dreams, myths, fairy tales, metamorphoses, the unruly unconscious, epic journeys, and a highly sensual celebration of sexuality in both its most joyous and darkest manifestations.”
—Ian McEwan
 
“She was, among other things, a quirky, original, and baroque stylist, a trait especially marked in The Bloody Chamber—her vocabulary a mix of finely tuned phrase, luscious adjective, witty aphorism, and hearty, up-theirs vulgarity.”
—Margaret Atwood, THE OBSERVER
 
“[The Bloody Chamber] is her great book, the one that only she could have written . . . The strange things in those tales—the werewolves and snow maidens, the spider-hung caves and liquefying mirrors—are made to live again by means of a prose informed by the wonders of cinema and psychoanalysis and Symbolist poetry.”
—from the Introduction by Joan Acocella