Angela Carter
The Bloody Chamber
- the legend of Bluebeard, Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots, Beauty and the Beast, vampires and werewolves.
- retold fairytales
- mocking, seductive, dark
- Chocker by Honeyblood: this song is loosely based on a short story by Angela Carter called 'The Bloody Chamber’
- join the circus on its magical tour through turn-of-the-nineteenth-century London, St Petersburg and Siberia.
- part woman, part swan
- an American journalist is on a quest to discover the truth behind her identity.
Wise Children
- richly comic tale of the tangled fortunes of two theatrical families
- many sets of twins, and mistaken identities
The Passion of the New Eve
- a young Englishman, along a journey through mythology and sexuality
- how he learns to be a woman
Edgar Allan Poe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQOhM6c0-Lo (lady talking about his life)
The Raven
- poem has a musical quality
- supernatural atmosphere
- depicting the man's slow fall into madness
- his distress with its constant repetition of the word "Nevermore"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BefliMlEzZ8 (Christopher Lee reading)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLiXjaPqSyY (The Simpsons version)
The Fall of the House of Usher
- the narrator arrives at his friend's house to find Usher ill
- His symptoms include hyperesthsia (hyper sensitivity to light, sound, and smells), and acute anxiety
- scary
The Black Cat
- first-person narrator
- how alcohol and self-deception led him to kill his pets and murder his wife.
Cormac Mccarthy
The Road
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApYmvPqIFwQ (trailer for film)
- father and his young son walk alone through burned America
- nothing but a pistol to defend themselves the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food - and each other
- Book written as a stream of conciousness
No Country for Old Men
- a hunter stumbles upon a transaction gone horribly wrong
- begins a terrifying chain of events
Child of God
- unforgettable conclusion
- most sordid aspects of life with dignity
- chilling novel that plumbs the depths of human degradation
- stunning scenes of the comic and the grotesque
Toni Morrison
The Bluest Eye
- the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family
- post-Depression 1940s Ohio
- prays each night for blue eyes like those of her privileged white schoolfellows
- how the past savagely defines the present
Jazz
- shoots his teenage lover to death
- passionate, profound story of love and obsession
- brings us back and forth in time
- emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of black urban life.
Beloved
- Terrible, unspeakable things happened to the farm where she lived
- she lived as a slave for so many years until she escaped to Ohio but eighteen years later she is still not free
- haunted by the memories of her past but also by the ghost of her baby
Tar Baby
- Son, a criminal on the run, uneducated, violent, contemptuous-young American black of extreme beauty from small-town Florida
- Morrison follows their affair, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women
Harper Lee
To Kill A Mockingbird
- Shoot all the Bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a Mockingbird
- Studied this to death during secondary school, loved the book but can't do it again...
Go Set a Watchman
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