Fireworks Nine Profane Pieces Author:Angela Carter In the short fiction of Angela Carter, the landmarks of reality disappear and give way to a landscape of riotous and uncensored sensibility. The city of Tokyo turns into a mirrored chamber reflecting the impossible longings of an exiled Englishwoman abandoned by her Japanese lover. An itinerant puppet show becomes a theatre of murderous lust. A ... more »walk through the forest ends in a nightmarish encounter with a gun-toting nymph and her hermaphrodite 'aunt'. Not simply a book of tales, Fireworks is a headlong plunge into an alternate universe, the unique creation of one of the most fertile, dark, irreverent, and baroquely beautiful imaginations in contemporary fiction.
A souvenir of Japan
An English woman living in Tokyo details an affair with a younger Japanese man. As she tries to understand the fragile beauty that exists within their relationship she examines the wider role of women in society, describing Japan as "a man's country". This story is presumably semi-autobiographical.
The executioner's beautiful daughter
In a small upland village incest is a crime so rife the entire community has been shunned by other towns, and whilst the penalty for the crime is death there is one who can commit it with impunity. The executioner is a law to himself, killing his son for raping his daughter, but committing the same crime himself.
The loves of lady purple
An Asiatic Professor travels west across Europe performing a marionette show. The tragic tale of Lady Purple; orphan, murderer of her foster parents, prostitute. As the years have gone by he has grown evermore frail, but the puppet's movements have grow more fluid. She finally becomes real, feeding on his blood and burning the body she leaves to find a brothel, for she can only be what he has made her.
The smile of winter
An English woman spends a winter living on a rural coastline in Japan. Having come to the beach in order to be lonely she uses the different elements of her surroundings to portray their indifference to her.
Penetrating to the heart of the forest
A sister and brother live in an Eden-like paradise, a place defined by their prepubescent innocence. As they grow older the mysterious forest which surrounds them becomes evermore alluring, they explore its depths finding at last a tree bearing a beautifully ripe fruit; when they eat it they notice the curves of each others changing bodies.
Flesh and the mirror
A woman returning to Tokyo searches fruitlessly for her lover who has failed to meet up with her. Finding another man she attempts to recreate that lost intimacy in the mirror above a hotel room bed.
Master
A great white hunter comes to the Americas in order to hunt jaguars. He takes a female slave, whom he names "Friday", and whom he also rapes. She, feeling a supernatural connection with the jaguar that he kills, eventually shoots and kills her "master".
Reflections
A boy goes on a Through-the-Looking-Glass-like adventure into a bizarre, reversed world. He encounters an elderly woman who is actually a hermaphrodite, and is raped by a girl in a forest before ultimately escaping.
Elegy for a free-lance
A nameless revolutionary describes the lives of herself and her cohorts. As they prepare to commit an act of political terrorism, she relates the interactions that they have with their idiosyncratic neighbours.« less