Burning the ships brings together all of Angela Carter's story books - Artificial Fireworks, The Bloody Chamber, Black Venus and American Ghosts and Old World Wonders, as well as the early and unpublished stories - and it is an unbeatable occasion to discover and celebrate a writer of its magnitude, a virtuoso of prose, intelligent, baroque, imaginative, irreverent, always fascinating. Oriental daydreams, puppets that come to life, basements crowded with the instruments of annihilation, executioners in love with their daughters, werewolves, vampires prey of ennui, Poe, Lizzie Borden, vindictive portrayals of Jeanne Duval, westerns with the devil in between, Shakespeare, the inverted worlds behind the mirror, psycho-sexual darkness, empowered protagonists who decide to change the end of the story ... An inexhaustible torrent of stories in which Carter's interest in Gothic, teratological, psychoanalysis, and his love for pantomime, farce, theater, cinema, and everything that problematizes the boundaries between identity and representation; approaches that Carter always performs through a feminist and deconstructive look, and displaying the magic of his style, his humor, his suggestive play with symbols, his erudition, his exquisite and sacrilegious soul ...

Carter, as Salman Rushdie points out in his prologue to this edition, "died at the height of his powers." "The stories in this volume give the measure of our loss," he continues. «But they are also our treasure». Let us do justice, then, to this treasure and its inextinguishable brilliance.