The Girls Are Pretty Crocodiles - & other fairy tales

Angela Readman

Sinopse

Bold, beautiful and spiky, Angela Readman's stories are both magical and real. Following her acclaimed debut Don't Try This at Home, in this new collection, she approaches the fairy tale with a scalpel. The Girls are Pretty Crocodiles reads like a love letter to girlhood and a ransom note to all the fairy tales we have been told. In her prize-winning work 'The Story Never Told', an illiterate woman sells fairy tales for a book she knows will never have her name on the cover. In 'What's Inside a Girl', a class takes lessons on dating invisible girls.
Dark, funny and surreal, these stories explore, challenge and ultimately transform the traditional fairy tale narrative. Women learn to be origami, climb into swan skins, feed wolves, flip burgers and snog kelpies. In dazzling prose that remains matter-of-fact, these tales take to task the happy endings we have been sold.
Otherworldly, yet down to earth, The Girls are Pretty Crocodiles discovers the hidden voice in the stories we know and reveals the magic of working-class lives. These stories have teeth.
"Angela Readman's stories have a compelling intimacy and gorgeous imagery, and are often deeply moving – highly recommended reading." Alison Moore, author of Booker-shortlisted The Lighthouse
"Angela Readman's subtly dark stories rip the covers from the everyday. She turns its innocents and introverts inside-out before us, meanwhile exposing secret rituals and Chinese-whispery legends from all our suffocating and self-contained neighbourhoods. Throughout this new collection, the other Angela – Carter – hangs on Readman's shoulder as she creates an eerie new folklore for fraught times. These are the stories we always knew existed but were never brave enough to tell, even to ourselves." Ashley Stokes, author of Gigantic, Unsung Stories, 2021
"A poetic recontextualising of fairy tales and folklore, The Girls Are Pretty Crocodiles manages to be both playful and dangerous, often in the same sentence. Readman deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Kirsty Logan and Marina Warner, as one of the natural successors to Angela Carter." Dan Coxon, author of Only The Broken Remain and editor of This Dreaming Isle

Disponível desde: 29/08/2022.

Comprimento de impressão: 146 páginas.

Outros livros que poderiam interessá-lo

The Bearer

M.H. Lee

Ka was raised to be a Bearer, a surrogate for wealthy parents who don't want to or can't have their own children. Forced to stay silent and devote every moment of every day and every action to creating the perfect environment for growing someone else's child, she'd never questioned her role. Until now.

Ver livro

The Bottle Imp

Robert Louis Stevenson

The Bottle Imp by Robert Louis Stevenson tells the story of Keawe, a Hawaiian man who buys a magical bottle containing an imp that grants its owner any wish. However, there's a catch: the bottle must be sold to another person for a lower price than what the current owner paid, otherwise, the owner's soul will be claimed by the devil upon their death. 
Keawe experiences both the incredible joys and the terrifying anxieties that come with possessing such an object. He gains wealth and status, but lives under the constant shadow of needing to sell the bottle under a specific condition. The story explores themes of temptation, desire, the nature of happiness, and the value of one's soul.

Ver livro

Watch With Me - and Six Other...

Wendell Berry

This volume of six linked stories and the novella from which the book derives its title is set in Port William from 1908 to the Second World War. Here Wendell Berry introduces two of his more indelible and poignant characters, Ptolemy Proudfoot and his wife Miss Minnie, remarkable for the comic and affectionate range that—with the mastery of this consummate storyteller working at the height of his powers—here approaches the Shakespearean. 
 
 
 
Tol Proudfoot is huge, outsized, in the tradition of the mythic. The three-hundred-pound farmer, personally imposing and unkempt, is also the most graceful of presences, reserved and gallant toward his tiny wife, the ninety-pound schoolteacher. 
 
 
 
Their contrasts are humorous, of course, and recall the tall tales of rural Americana. In the novella Watch with Me, we are given a story of such depth, breadth, and importance it earns being listed as one of the most important short stories written in the American language during the twentieth century.

Ver livro

The Unnameable

H.P. Lovecraft

Title: The Unnameable
Author: H. P. Lovecraft
Narrator: Jonathan Dunne
Original Publication: 1923
Public Domain: Yes
Series Placement: Number 49 in the Timeless Terrors series
Description:
The Unnameable is H. P. Lovecraft’s wry yet deeply unsettling meditation on the limits of language, the arrogance of rationalism, and the encroaching chaos of the ineffable.
Set amid the decaying graveyards of New England, the tale follows two friends — one a writer of strange tales, the other a skeptic — as they debate the very existence of the “unnameable.” Their intellectual banter turns to horror when they confront the impossible firsthand, discovering that some horrors defy not only reason but description itself.
Blending gothic atmosphere with cosmic dread, Lovecraft transforms a seemingly simple ghost story into a darkly humorous and deeply disquieting reflection on humanity’s need to name — and thereby contain — its fears.
Narrated by Amazon-bestselling horror author Jonathan Dunne, this performance captures both the sardonic wit and the creeping terror of Lovecraft’s vision — a world where words fail and madness begins. While the text is in the public domain, this narration is an original performance and copyright © 2025 Jonathan Dunne.
Part of Timeless Terrors, a series devoted to resurrecting the masters of the macabre and uncanny, The Unnameable endures as one of Lovecraft’s most compact and haunting explorations of the indescribable — a tale that proves some things are better left unspoken.

Ver livro

Top 10 Short Stories The -...

Nikolai Gogol, Guy De...

Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. A few pages can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere.

In this series we try to offer up tried and trusted ‘Top Tens’ across many different themes and authors. But any anthology will immediately throw up the questions – Why that story? Why that author?

The theme itself will form the boundaries for our stories which range from well-known classics, newly told, to stories that modern times have overlooked but perfectly exemplify the theme. Throughout the volume our authors whether of instant recognition or new to you are all leviathans of literature.

Some you may disagree with but they will get you thinking; about our choices and about those you would have made. If this volume takes you on a path to discover more of these miniature masterpieces then we have all gained something.

In this volume our classic authors share their narratives in the form of letters to create both intimacy and the knowing that the events unfolding, line by line, will bring both knowledge and revelation in very short order.

01 - Top Ten Stories - Epistolary - An Introduction
2 - Diary of a Madman by Nikolai Gogol
3 - Le Horla by Guy de Maupassant
4 - The Story of B 24 by Arthur Conan Doyle
5 - Eve's Diary by Mark Twain
6 - Diary of a Plain Girl by Amy Levy
7 - The Diary of a God by Barry Pain
8 - The Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth by Rhoda Broughton
9 - Morphine by Mikhail Bulgakov
10 - The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
11 - Dionea - Part 1 by Vernon Lee
12 - Dionea - Part 2 by Vernon Lee

Ver livro

A Knot of Ribbon - From their...

Laurence Alma-Tadema

The bookshelves of British literature are incredible collections that have gathered together centuries of very talented authors.  From these Isles their fame spread and whilst among their number many are now forgotten or neglected their talents endure.  Among them is Laurence Alma-Tadema.

Ver livro