With a new introduction by Jack Zipes

‘A great writer … a burlesque artist of genius’ Salman Rushdie

With her wryly subversive and exuberant take on Perrault’s classic fairy tales, Angela Carter conjures up a world of resourceful women, black-hearted villains, desperate predicaments, wily stratagems and fantastical transformations.

Here nothing is as it seems

in ‘Cinderella’ charm and a powerful patron prove more useful than beauty; in ‘Bluebeard’ a brazen wife outwits her murderous husband; in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ smooth pelts hide the most dangerous wolves of all; and in ‘Sleeping Beauty’ we learn that long engagements aren’t always the best.

By turns playful, frank, cruel and unnerving, these stories bristle with worldly common sense, earthy humour and gothic imagination.

‘Her writing is pyrotechnic’ Observer