A Card from Angela Carter

Author(s): Susannah Clapp

Short Stories

A unique and dazzling portrait of Angela Carter by her friend and literary executor. Angela Carter was one of the most vivid voices of the twentieth century: much studied, copied and adored. When she died at the age of fifty-one, she had published fifteen books of fiction and essays; outrage at her omission from the shortlists of any Booker Prize led to the foundation of the Orange Prize. February 2012 will be the twentieth anniversary of her death but no biographical work has yet appeared. Susannah Clapp and Angela Carter were friends for many years. The postcards that Carter sent to her form a paper trail through her life. The pictures she sent were sometimes domestic, sometimes flights of fantasy and surrealism. The messages were always pungent. From Stratford, Ontario, she explained that Canada was 'like Scandinavia, with liquor'. From the States, where she was smarting from a critical onslaught in the London Review of Books, where Susannah then worked, she sent a terrifying picture of Texan chili, with the message: 'Carter's reply to the critics...goes through you like a dose of salts...I'd liked to feed it to that drivelling wimp...' Through the medium of her postcards Susannah Clapp evokes Angela Carter's anarchic intelligence, her fierce politics, the richness of her language, her ribaldry, the great swoops of her imagination...Intimate, funny, unexpected, A Card From Angela Carter catches this unique artist on the wing.


Product Information

No other biographical work exists about Angela Carter, whose inimitable and celebrated work continues to be studied all over the world. Bloody Chamber is a set text on the AQA A Level syllabus. Published to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Angela Carter's death Susannah Clapp is an extremely high profile journalist and this book will recieve huge coverage in the press

Praise for With Chatwin: Portrait of a Writer: 'Beautifully written... compulsive reading' Robert McCrum, Observer 'A fresh, vivid portrait' Edmund White 'An enchanting memoir of her friend - neatly packed with precisely the kind of detailed observation that renders such portraits compelling' SundayTelegraph 'An elegant, sleek and lapidary volume' Hilary Spurling, Daily Telegraph

Susannah Clapp is the literary executor for Angela Carter and Bruce Chatwin, and is the author of With Chatwin, an acclaimed portrait of Bruce Chatwin. She helped to found the London Review of Books, has worked as a publisher's reader and editor, as the radio critic of the Sunday Times and as the theatre critic of the New Statesman. She has reviewed novels and non-fiction for the Times Literary Supplement, the New Yorker, the Sunday Times, the Observer, the London Review of Books, the New Statesman and the Independent on Sunday. She is a regular contributor to Radio 3's Nightwaves, and has been the theatre critic of the Observer since 1997. Susannah Clapp lives in London.

General Fields

  • : 9781408826904
  • : Bloomsbury
  • : bloomsbury
  • : December 2011
  • : 178mm X 111mm
  • : United Kingdom
  • : March 2012
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Susannah Clapp
  • : Hardback
  • : 1
  • : 823.914
  • : 112