Overview

'The stories are all sharp and strange... this is a book about now written with a far-sighted and relentless intelligence' - Ali Smith, Guardian Like her award-winning novels, Marina Warner's stories conjure up mysteries and wonders in a physical world, treading a delicate, magical line between the natural and the supernatural, between openness and fear.In 'Natural Limits', a bereaved woman, contemplating the massacre of 11,000 virgins, comes to terms with the unimaginable. The title story and 'Canary' search for signs of evil or innocence written on the body. The 'Insomniac Princess' finds that unheard melodies are indeed sweeter; whereas other stories give voice to the traditionally voiceless - the artist's model and the film double.Here are fabulous images of saints and sinners, bats and nightingales, pink flesh and putrefaction in an electrifying new collection.

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9780099428374

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Reviews

'Warner writes with the delicacy of a tightrope walker- the result is exhilarating' Financial Times 'The stories are all sharp and strange, [this is] a book about now written with a far-sighted and relentless intelligence' Guardian

In this collection the reader will not find miniature narratives with a neat plot and a satisfying twist in the tail . Rather, Marina Warner gives us glimpses of life seen through a slightly distorting and subjective lens. These stories leave pictures imprinted in the mind and shift one's perceptions forever. The title story is all the more disturbing in that it is breezily related in the first person in a familiar, colloquial style and yet brushes against all that is wicked and unthinkable. Over and over again as the author depicts the ordinary, safe world certain details are highlighted - a man's dirty fingernails, the sickening excess of food glistening on a deli counter - so that the reader is left with a feeling of surfeit and distaste. There is beauty too; Warner writes with clarity and an ability to find the perfect word or the unusual image. In her afterword she acknowledges certain artists, explaining that she often uses a picture as a prompt, and the art world figures in several of these stories. One of the most moving, 'Canary', features a group of painters in the time of free love and pot-smoking. Her image of the canary represents the vulnerability of all that is good: kindness, innocence, simplicity and love, for the canary can be used to detect contamination in the atmosphere and is the first to perish. Warner's delicate perceptiveness is seen in a character's decree that an outsider should not intrude into a friend's marriage: 'marriage is a sacred space, whatever degradation it has suffered, in which visitors take off their shoes and bare their heads and join in the liturgy as performed by the celebrants, rather than impose their own ideas.' This is a beautiful, memorable selection of stories. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Marina Warner spent her early years in Cairo, and was educated at a convent in Berkshire, and then in Brussels and London, before studying modern languages at Oxford. She is an internationally acclaimed cultural historian, critic, novelist and short story writer. From her early books on the Virgin Mary and Joan of Arc, to her bestselling studies of fairy tales and folk stories, From the Beast to the Blonde and No Go the Bogeyman, her work has explored different figures in myth and fairy tale and the art and literature they have inspired. She lectures widely in Europe, the United States and the Middle East, and is currently Professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex. She was appointed CBE in 2008. www.marinawarner.com

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