"Leonora Carrington has unswervingly followed the intensity of her own particular vision and way of being . . . Her work bristles with a fierce, unconventional brand of feminism; anger gives it its final edge of irony and power." Angela Carter
"Leonora Carrington is a true one-off, but she has a place in that bright constellation of absurdists, fabulists and dream voyagers, alongside Artaud and Lewis Carroll, Firbank and Gertrude Stein, Angela Carter and Patti Smith. But for far too long her unmistakable voice, wonderfully strange and funny, could only be heard and savoured over beloved, read-to-bits old copies of her writings. So all congratulations now to Silver Press for brilliantly bringing back into print this rich collection of her incomparable tales." Marina Warner
"Leonora Carrington is so inspiring . . . I love her freedom, her humour and how her work invents its own laws. What specifically do I take from her? Her wig." Björk
"Romantic heroines, beautiful and terrible . . . come back to life in women like Leonora Carrington." Octavio Paz
A debutante frees a hyena from the zoo so that it might take her place at her coming-out ball; an artist paints a portrait of a man’s dead wife, but finds she has painted herself instead; a woman makes love to a boar underneath a mountain of cats; a chicken is roasted with the brains and livers of thrushes, truffles, crushed sweet almonds, rose conserve and drops of divine liqueur; two noble sisters wonder whether anybody can be ‘a person of quality if they wash away their ghosts with common sense’; a psychoanalyst must decide what to do with the gift of a team of Russian rats trained to operate on humans. In this first complete edition of Leonora Carrington’s short stories, written throughout her life from her early years in Surrealist Paris to her late period in Dirty War-era Mexico City, the world is by turns subversive, funny, sly, wise and disarming.