the complete stories of leonora carrington by leonora carrington

Foul, stinking odors waft throughout the collection, inlaying a texture of realism amid otherwise fantastical worlds. Yet prose makes available to Carrington a wry deadpan that painting does not-these stories are funny-as well as images that preclude visual representation.

The British-born Carrington, who in her youth moved to Paris and befriended the Surrealists, is perhaps better known as a painter of dreamlike tableaus in which wild-maned, wispy androgynes consort with half-human beasts and spindly plant life. Absurdities and grotesqueries abound, yet the protagonists meet them with a nonchalance and pragmatism so composed, so sensible, as to render the explicitly strange strangely ordinary. But the debutante casts doubt on the plan: Won't the maid die without a face? Won't somebody find the corpse? 'It's not practical,' she warns.Ĭarrington's matter-of-fact presentation of the bizarre and the gruesome lends a distinctive black humor to her short stories, here collected in their entirety for the first time, including three that have never before been published. In search of a way to disguise its face, the hyena proposes to tear off the maid's to wear as its own. In 'The Debutante,' the titular character enlists a hyena to attend a lavish ball in her place. The woman first rationalizes the savage scene as a nightmare, but is no more unnerved upon realizing that she can't have dreamed it, she has yet to go to bed. In 'Uncle Sam Carrington,' a woman witnesses two cabbages 'tearing each other's leaves off with such ferocity' that soon only torn leaves remain. His rationale: 'There's no better way of growing mushrooms.' A nuisance, yes, but no matter: she will hire a horse and cart to transport her there. In 'The Royal Summons,' the third in this delightful collection of Leonora Carrington's gothic short stories, a woman beckoned by the queen to the palace finds her chauffeur has buried her car. Laura Poitras's Riskby Anya Jaremko-Greenwold

Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happenby Michael WilsonĬhristos Chrissopoulos's The Parthenon Bomberby Saul Anton.

Zinzi Clemmons's What We Loseby Yasmin RoshanianĪnne Garréta's Not One Dayby Youmna Chlala

The Complete Stories of Leonora Carringtonby Sarah ResnickĪlbert Serra's The Death of Louis XIVby Clinton Krute.

Lake Michigan, Scene 10by Daniel Borzutzky

Wish-Fulfilling Jewels & the Poetby John Giorno Sharon Johnston and Mark Leeby Frank Gesualdi

The complete stories of leonora carrington by leonora carrington