I think Carter is at her best writing novels, but these short stories are still pretty grand. Little snippets of postcolonialist feminist academia is perhaps a better description than "story", however. ( )

Almost all of these stories serve as some indecent amendment to history that will forever be left out of textbooks. These are histories I want to believe. They seem to belong to another time, not the 20th Century, and they are all somewhat cruel, indeed making strangers out of saints and vice versa. I give five stars to the stories I loved the most--"Our Lady of the Massacre," "The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe," and "Black Venus" in particular. As a whole, this collection didn't read as cleanly for me, but Carter's got some lines that bring me to my knees. ( )

A collection of modernised and/or real-ified fairy tales. (Wow I am eloquent early in the morning.) I really liked the story based on Peter and the Wolf. Incredible writing. Some of the stories were a bit boring, so only 4 stars. ( )

"To rehearse the long part of dying." (!) ( )

Nice collection of short stories by the journalis Angela Carter with deliriously delicious complex language and each story engaging in one or other form. Shows the power of female authors.

The strongest story is the titular one 'Black Venus' its a small personal history about Charles Baudelaires muse. An ingenious tale in which Carter masterfully weaves poems of Baudelaires 'les Fleurs du Mal.'
Favorite passage by this muse:
'Down there, far below, where the buttocks of the world slim down again, if you go far south enough you reach again the realm of perpetual cold that begins and ends our experience of this earth, those ranges of ice mountains where the bull-roaring winds bay and bellow and no people are, only the stately penguin in his frock coat not unlike yours, Daddy, the estimable but, unlike you uxorious penguin who balances the precious egg on his feet while his dear wife goes out and has a good time as the Antartic may afford.
If Daddy where like a penguin, how much more happy we should be, there isn't room for two albatrosses in this house.' ( )