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A Card from Angela Carter

A Card from Angela Carter

by SusannahClapp (Author)

  • Used

    Hardcover 2012

    $3.29
Synopsis

Angela Carter was one of the most vivid voices of the twentieth century. When she died in 1992 at the age of fifty-one, she had published fifteen books of fiction and essays; outrage at her omission from any Booker Prize shortlists led to the foundation of the Orange Prize. Angela Carter sent her friend Susannah Clapp postcards from all over the world, missives which form a paper trail through her life. The pictures she chose were sometimes domestic, sometimes flights of fantasy and surrealism. The messages were always pungent. Here, Susannah Clapp uses postcards - the emails of the twentieth century - to travel through Angela Carter's life, and to evoke her anarchic intelligence, fierce politics, rich language and ribaldry, and the great swoops of her imagination.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
 Pages: 112
 Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published: 02 Feb 2012
ISBN 10: 1408826909
ISBN 13: 9781408826904
Book Overview: A unique and dazzling portrait of Angela Carter by her friend and literary executor

Media Reviews
A small masterpiece; in close-up, a warm and intimate portrait achieved with the most minimal, impressionistic strokes, in a wide-angle what its author calls a zigzag path through the 80s -- Ahdaf Soueif * Guardian, Books of the Year *
[An] exquisite jewel of a book ... Clapp skilfully weaves Carter's pithy correspondence into a moving account of her life ... It is inquiring, irreverent, kind and often quirky [and] will send you scurrying back to the bookshelves to rediscover the work of one of England's brilliant baroque novelists * Sunday Times *
An amazing book. I read it cover to cover and learned so much - you don't need an 800 page biography of someone to paint a really sharp picture of them. In fact, I shall remember this book much more than if I had waded through a tome. It's a gem - adorable. And [it has] a wonderful epitaph * Victoria Hislop *
Colourfully characterised through ribald and sardonically surreal postcards sent to friends from her travels, commenting on her activities and attitudes. There will be other, bigger biographies, but none more evocative than this sampler precisely stitched in literary petit-point * The Times *
Gives a unique insight into one of modern literature's most original and best-loved authors * Evening Standard *
Short and sweet ... captures [Angela Carter's] humour, and describes her obsessions, travels, lefty politics, cats, her husband and son, her works and their author - witty, unpredictable, fierce ... A Card From Angela Carter is a slim book, but big hearted. Unapologetically reverential, it sings with love * The Spectator *
Far more captivating than fiction ... a luminous picture of her friend and correspondent ... an intimate, funny book, sometimes ribald, sometimes fierce, but fascinating all the same * Independent, 10 Best New Biographies *
Susannah Clapp's A Card from Angela Carter, first published in 2012, has been reissued in a bright, light and utterly charming edition. Framed around the postcards that clap received from Carter during the many years of their friendship (which includes pictures of Charles and Di, armadillos, sun-baked buttocks and trucks shaped as chickens), the book catches its subject on the wing and nails her gift for a story in a word . A master if precision in her own right, Clapp takes eulogy in a new direction and provides a masterclass in the art of criticism -- Frances Wilson * New Statesman *
Clapp's text is warm and loyal, funny yet formal, and the view it presents of its subject is of a delightfully bawdy, big-boned magnificence of a woman. This paperback makes a companion piece to Edmund Gordon's thorough new biography, published this autumn -- Jenny Turner * Guardian *
Author Bio
Susannah Clapp is the literary executor of Angela Carter and the author of With Chatwin. She helped found the London Review of Books and has worked as a publisher's reader and editor, as radio critic of the Sunday Times and theatre critic of the New Statesman. She has been the theatre critic of the Observer since 1997. Susannah Clapp lives in London. @susannahclapp