LEONORA
CARRINGTON
THE OVAL LADY & OTHER STORIES
Translation Kleopatra Elaiotriviari, Maria Fakinou, Myrsini Gkana
This edition gathers, for the first time, all the short stories of the surrealist writer and painter Leonora Carrington. Her transcendent imagination, biting satire, and rebellious spirit are distilled to perfection in these brief stories, originally written in three different languages.
Painter and writer Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) possessed a singular mastery of the macabre: she could conjure dazzling images, wield razor-sharp satire, scandalize through mockery, and slip effortlessly into worlds of pure imagination.
Nowhere did she channel this temperament and artistry more brilliantly than in the short stories she wrote throughout her life.
With astonishing shifts in style, tone, subject matter, and even language (English, French, and Spanish), these stories capture the brilliant and untamed spirit of this extraordinary woman. André Breton described them as “the very embodiment of black humor.”
Indeed, what seems excessive or bizarre to us was, for Carrington, simply ordinary life. How could it be otherwise, when as a little girl all she wished for was to learn how to walk a few inches above the ground?
This edition follows the most complete and definitive collection of Carrington’s stories, published in 2017 to mark the centenary of her birth.
