The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

Okay, so I debated this one all day on Thursday, all about splitting hairs and such.  Apparently there is a movemet to make May into Short Story Month, something I didn't know about until this late in the month, and darn, because I would have totally run with it if I had known earlier. 

I learned this when my news search sent me to In Other Words, a blog on The Globe and Mail, which has been providing links to short stories all month long.  Well, Thursday's honored author was Angela Carter and the link provided in the article was to the full text of her classic, The Bloody Chamber, online.  (My own link is an Amazon link, by the way.) The text for the book is hosted on Angelfire and it is obviously a copyright infringement stateside.  It is also apparently a long existing file with no other identifying marks on it.  Why it hasn't been removed, I don't know. 

Anyway, due to the obvious copyright infringement, I will not link directly to the text from this blog.  You choose what to do when you click through to the short article about Carter.  I encourage you to buy the book.  I couldn't resist linking to the article and blog since I loved that Carter was recognized along with several other luminaries for the month, from Lovecraft to O'Conner to Carver.  Great stuff.  Great links.  And here's the little bit about Carter:

The re-imagined fairy tale went from being a small genre of the 1970s to a full-blown writing language that had an immense impact on postmodern fiction. Years before all that, there was the late Angela Carter and The Bloody Chamber, which, as well as being a feminist reading of fairy tales, is also full-blooded storytelling. Many have since tried this model but few have had Carter’s teeth, which were as sharp as her critical eye.

Finally, here's a link to The Bloody Chamber: And Other Stories by Angela Carter as well as a cover image on Amazon.