Angela Carter’s ever-popular collection of short stories, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, is now available in a beautiful hardback edition as part of the Vintage Classics series. This new edition of Carter’s classic collection comes with gorgeous, fairy tale-inspired illustrations that adorn the jacket. The illustrations are by Olaf Hajek, a German-based illustrator, painter, artist, graphic designer, and author. As you see from the images below, each chapter is also headed with one of the objects from the front cover, such as the black rose.
Like the paperback edition, this version also features an introduction by Helen Simpson, which considers Carter’s luscious prose style, her relationship to folk and fairy tales, and her literary influences, amongst other things. As she writes of the collection:
“The Bloody Chamber is like a multi-faceted glittering diamond reflecting and refracting a variety of portraits of desire and sexuality […] which, unusually for the time, 1979, are told from a heterosexual female viewpoint.”
Head over to the Vintage Classics section of Penguin Books to check out this beautiful edition of The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories and enjoy the images below. I would like to thank Vintage for their generosity in sending me a copy of this book for review purposes.
Angela Carter Online 