Empty Your Heart on Angela Carter's Fireworks

(My Angela Carter collection; for a larger version, click here; I have Burning Your Boats, too, but it's in the bookshelf holding our weird antho source material.)Paul Charles Smith plans to cover all of Angela Carter's fiction, and his first post is on her first collection Fireworks. I found Fireworks to be fascinating because it's somewhat uneven--her evocations of a South American setting and a few others seem like mere stage props, not particularly convincing--and shows Carter finding her voice. Many stories are also clearly affected by her divorce and feeling isolated in another country. I'm not sure I agree with all of Smith's analysis, but it's worth checking out since he's doing such a comprehensive series. One thing's for sure--Carter was, for her entire career, profane, transgressive, and totally uninterested in uniformity or traditional ways of looking at things.I've got an extensive essay on Carter's work that's currently housed at the Scriptorium. I haven't looked at it recently, and don't know if it holds up--I wrote it many years ago, when I was 23 or 24.And if you're not interested in Angela Carter, here's our cat trying to get into my office.