68. Angela Carter - The Bloody Chamber & Other Stories

June 11, 2018 John Mitchinson

Andy and John are at the Bath Festival recording a live edition of Backlisted in the neo-classical splendour of the Assembly Rooms. They are joined by novelist and Bath resident Rachel Heath, whose first book, The Finest Type of English Womanhood, was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award in 2009 and her second, Part of the Spell, was published by Hutchinson in 2012; by Arifa Akbar, journalist, critic, prize-judge and and now editor-in-chief of the Unbound online magazine, Boundless and by Alex Clark, who is also a journalist, critic and literary taste-maker and one of the artistic directors of the Bath Festival. In a departure from the usual 'what have you been reading' format, there is a preliminary discussion of the influence and legacy of the great American novelist Philip Roth, whose death was announced the previous evening.

Books mentioned:

Angela Carter - The Bloody Chamber & Other Stories (1979); The Magic Toyshop (1967); Love (1971); Nights at the Circus (1984); Wise Children (1991); The Sadeian Woman & the Ideology of Pornography (1979); Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings (1982)
Philip Roth - Sabbath's Theater (1995); American Pastoral (1997); The Human Stain (2000); The Plot Against America (2004); Portnoy's Complaint (1969); Goodbye, Columbus (1959); I Married a Communist (1998)
Edmund Gordon - The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography
Bruno Bettelheim - The Uses of Enchantment: the Meaning & Importance of Fairy Tales
Marina Warner - From The Beast To The Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers
E.L. James - Fifty Shades of Grey
Angela Carter - The Bloody Chamber (audio book read by Richard Armitage & Emilia Fox)
York Notes on The Bloody Chamber