Synopsis A cycle of nine stories about women, each written in a different style, from all dialogue, to lists and notes, to conventional narratives.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1997-10-01 |
| Size | | Length: | 221 pages | | Height: | 9.0 in | | Width: | 6.0 in | | Thickness: | 0.8 in | | Weight: | 14.4 oz |
Publisher's Note Dark, witty, and entertaining, THE SKULL OF CHARLOTTE CORDAY AND OTHER STORIES is Leslie Dick's searing exploration of the impossibility of being a woman. The stories return insistently to the innermost dilemmas of femininity, spinning strange tales of medical humiliation, sexual betrayal, perverse eroticism, and the unsettling traumas of child rearing.
The title story, "THE SKULL OF CHARLOTTE CORDAY," tells the tale of the beautiful assassin who, at the onset of the Great Terror, murdered the French revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat in his both. After her public execution, Corday's skull, a rich prize in the head-trading industry of the day, found its way into the hands of the day, found its way into the hands of a descendant of Napoleon, Princess Marie Bonaparte, who was to become a pioneer psychoanalyst. Leslie Dick skillfully interweaves the astonishing stories of these two women, their melodramatic lives linked by a macabre trophy.
Following in the footsteps of Angela Carter and J. G. Ballard, Leslie Dick writes fantastically, yet with a clinical precision, using her rare knowledge of the shadowy corners of history as the basis for her unusual stories. She is a cutting-edge stylist. From contemporary motherhood in Los Angeles to computer sex in Paris, these stories explore people, places, and emotions with an uncanny eye for detail and a sharp insight into the grand outrageousness of life.
This brilliant collection of short stories descends into the deeper recesses of the human mind and maps the bizarre byways of human history. The title story tells the true tale of the assassin who murdered the French revolutionary leader Jean Paul Marat in his bath. After a public execution, Corday's skull found its way into the hands of Princess Marie Bonaparte, who was to become a pioneer psychoanalyst. Leslie Dick skillfully interweaves the stories of these two women, their lives linked by the macabre trophy.
Industry Reviews "Leslie Dick's stories are full of women with displaced desires. There are women who have sex in the free-floating space of the Internet. There are women who gaze in wonderment at the alien lands of their wombs, as they spring up on hospital monitors like movies set in outer space. Finally, there are women with malign, transmigratory babies that lodge themselves in the maternal body in order to test Freud's theories about attachment and splitting." Times Literary Supplement - Katy Emck (11/17/1995)
"Relentlessly intelligent and gracefully written." book jacket - Patrick McGrath
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