والان مع سر الروعة في الرواية :



95 ـ الخصوصية، للمؤلف جيمس إيلروي

The story revolves around a group of LAPD officers in the early 1950s who become embroiled in a mix of sex, corruption, and murder following a mass murder at the Nite Owl coffee shop. The story eventually encompasses organized crime, political corruption, heroin trafficking, pornography, prostitution, institutional racism, and Hollywood. The title refers to the scandal magazine Confidential, which is fictionalized as Hush-Hush. It also deals with the real-life Bloody Christmas scandal.
The three protagonists are LAPD officers. Edmund Exley, the son of a legendary detective, is a "straight arrow" who informs on other officers in a police brutality scandal. This earns the enmity of Wendell "Bud" White, an intimidating enforcer with a personal fixation on men who abuse women. Between the two of them is Jack Vincennes, a flashy cop who moonlights on a police television show and provides tips to a scandal magazine. The three of them must set their differences aside to unravel the conspiracy linking the novel's events.

Ellroy was born in Los Angeles, California, the son of Geneva Odelia (née Hilliker) Ellroy, a nurse, and Armand Ellroy, an accountant and, according to Ellroy, onetime business manager of Rita Hayworth.
After his parents' divorce, Ellroy and his mother relocated to El Monte, California. In 1958, Ellroy's mother was murdered.
تطلق والده وانتقلت الام لتعيش مع ابنه في كاليفورنيا وفي عام 1958 قتلت الام
The police never found the perpetrator, and the case remains unsolved.
لم يعرف البوليس القاتل وظلت القضية بدون حل
The murder, along with reading The Badge by Jack Webb (a book composed of sensational cases from the files of the Los Angeles Police Department, a birthday gift from his father), were important events of Ellroy's youth.
Ellroy's inability to come to terms with the emotions surrounding his mother's murder led him to transfer them onto another murder victim, Elizabeth Short, the "Black Dahlia"; throughout his youth, Ellroy used Short as a surrogate for his conflicting emotions and desires. His confusion and trauma led to a period of intense clinical depression, from which he recovered only gradually.
فشل الروي في التعامل مع عواطفه على اثر مقتل والدته مما ادى الى وقوعه في مشاكل نفسية مثل الكآبة والتي شفي منها بشكل تدريجي وكتب عن حالة قتل اخرى رواية فرغ فيها مشاعره حول قتل امه
Ellroy dropped out of school without graduating.
انفصل عن المدرسة قبل ان يتخرج
He joined the army for a short while.
انضم الى الجيش لفترة قصيرة
During his teens and twenties, he drank heavily and abused Benzedrex inhalers.
بعد مقتل والدته وخلال العشرينيات من عمره ادمن الكحول
He was engaged in minor crimes (especially shoplifting, house-breaking, and burglary) and was often homeless.
ارتكب بعض الجرائم الصغيرة مثل السرقة من المحلات التجارية واقتحام المنازل والسرقة وكان غالبا من دون مأوى
After serving some time in jail and suffering a bout of pneumonia, during which he developed an abscess on his lung "the size of a large man's fist," Ellroy stopped drinking and began working as a golfcaddy while pursuing writing. He later said, "Caddying was good tax-free cash and allowed me to get home by 2 p.m. and write books.... I caddied right up to the sale of my fifth book."
After a second marriage in the mid 1990s to Helen Knode (author of the 2003 novel The Ticket Out), the couple moved from California to Kansas City in 1995.
تزوج للمرة الثانية عام 1990
In 2006, after their divorce, Ellroy returned to Los Angeles.[ He is a self-described hermit who possesses very few technological amenities, including television, and claims never to read contemporary books by other authors, aside from Joseph Wambaugh's The Onion Field, for fear that they might influence his own.[ However, this does not mean that Ellroy does not read at all, as he claims in My Dark Places to have read at least two books a week growing up, eventually shoplifting more to satisfy his love of reading. He then goes on to say that he read works by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler accompanied by abuse of alcohol and Benzedrex inhalers.

Hallmarks of his work include dense plotting and a relentlessly pessimistic—albeit moral—worldview.[13][14] His work has earned Ellroy the nickname "Demon dog of American crime fiction."[15]
Ellroy writes longhand on legal pads rather than on a computer[16] and prepares elaborate outlines for his books, most of which are several hundred pages long.[14]
Dialog and narration in Ellroy novels often consists of a "heightened pastiche of jazz slang, cop patois, creative profanity and drug vernacular" with a particular use of period-appropriate slang.[17] He often employs stripped-down staccato sentence structures, a style that reaches its apex in The Cold Six Thousand and which Ellroy describes as a "direct, shorter-rather-than-longer sentence style that's declarative and ugly and right there, punching you in the nards."[14] This signature style is not the result of a conscious experimentation but of chance and came about when he was asked by his editor to shorten his novel White Jazz from 900 pages to 350. Rather than removing any subplots, Ellroy achieved this by eliminating verbs, creating a unique style of prose.[citation needed] While each sentence on its own is simple, the cumulative effect is a dense, baroque style.[17]

Main article: L.A. Quartet
While his early novels earned him a cult following, Ellroy earned much greater success and critical acclaim with the L.A. Quartet—The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz.[14] The four novels represent Ellroy's change of style from the tradition of classic modernist noir fiction of his earlier novels to so-called postmodernhistoriographicmetafiction.[18] The Black Dahlia, for example, fused the real-life murder of Elizabeth Short with a fictional story of two police officers investigating the crime.[19]

In media appearances, Ellroy has adopted an outsized, stylized public persona of hard-boiled nihilism and self-reflexive subversiveness.[14] He frequently begins public appearances with a monologue such as:
Good evening peepers, prowlers, pederasts, panty-sniffers, punks and pimps. I'm James Ellroy, the demon dog, the foul owl with the death growl, the white knight of the far right, and the slick trick with the donkey dick. I'm the author of 16 books, masterpieces all; they precede all my future masterpieces. These books will leave you reamed, steamed and drycleaned, tie-dyed, swept to the side, true-blued, tattooed and bah fongooed. These are books for the whole fuckin' family, if the name of your family is Manson.[20]
Another aspect of his public persona involves an almost comically grand assessment of his work and his place in literature. For example, he told the New York Times, "I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime novelist who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music."[21]
Ellroy frequently has espoused conservative political views, which have ranged from a vague antiliberalism to authoritarianism.[14] In an October 15, 2009, Rolling Stone interview, Ellroy said that in the 1960s and 1970s "I was never a peacemaker; I was a fuck-you right-winger." He has also been an outspoken and unquestioning admirer of the Los Angeles Police Department, and he dismisses the department's flaws as aberrations, telling the National Review that the coverage of the Rodney King beating and Rampart police scandals were overblown by a biased media.[22] Nevertheless, like other aspects of his persona, he often deliberately obscures where his public persona ends and his actual views begin. When asked about his "right-wing tendencies," he told an interviewer, "Right-wing tendencies? I do that to fuck with people."[23] Similarly, in the film Feast of Death, his (now ex-) wife describes his politics as "bullshit," an assessment to which Ellroy responds only with a knowing smile.[9] Privately, Ellroy opposes the death penalty and favors gun control.[24] Of the current political environment, Ellroy told Rolling Stone in 2009:
I thought Bush was a slimeball and the most disastrous American president in recent times. I voted for Obama. He's a lot like Jack Kennedy—they both have big ears and infectious smiles. But Obama is a deeper guy. Kennedy was an appetite guy. He wanted pussy, hamburgers, booze. Jack did a lot of dope.[23]
Structurally, several of Ellroy's books, such as The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, American Tabloid, and The Cold Six Thousand, have three disparate points of view through different characters, with chapters alternating between them. Starting with The Black Dahlia, Ellroy's novels have mostly been historical dramas about the relationship between corruption and law enforcement.[19]
A predominant theme of Ellroy's work is the myth of "closure." "Closure is bullshit," Ellroy often remarks, "and I would love to find the man who invented closure and shove a giant closure plaque up his ass."[25]
Ellroy has claimed that he is done with noir crime novels. "I write big political books now," he says. "I want to write about LA exclusively for the rest of my career. I don't know where and when."[26]

Several of Ellroy's works have been adapted to film, including Blood on the Moon (adapted as Cop), L.A. Confidential, Brown's Requiem, Killer on the Road/Silent Terror (adapted as Stay Clean), and The Black Dahlia. In each instance, screenplays based on Ellroy's work have been penned by other screenwriters.
While he has frequently been disappointed by these adaptations (such as Cop), he was very complimentary of Curtis Hanson and Brian Helgeland's screenplay for L.A. Confidential at the time of its release.[27] In succeeding years, however, his comments have been more reserved:
L.A. Confidential, the movie, is the best thing that happened to me in my career that I had absolutely nothing to do with. It was a fluke—and a wonderful one—and it is never going to happen again—a movie of that quality. Here’s my final comment on L.A. Confidential, the movie: I go to a video store in Prairie Village, Kansas. The youngsters who work there know me as the guy who wrote L.A. Confidential. They tell all the little old ladies who come in there to get their G-rated family flick. They come up to me, they say, “OOOO… you wrote L.A. Confidential.... Oh, what a wonderful, wonderful movie. I saw it four times. You don’t see storytelling like that on the screen anymore.” I smile, I say, “Yes, it’s a wonderful movie, and a salutary adaptation of my wonderful novel. But listen, granny: You love the movie. Did you go out and buy the book?” And granny invariably says, “Well, no, I didn’t.” And I say to granny, “Then what the fuck good are you to me?”[9]
Shortly after viewing three hours of unedited footage[28] for Brian De Palma's adaptation of The Black Dahlia, Ellroy wrote an essay, "Hillikers," praising De Palma and his film.[29] Ultimately, nearly an hour was removed from the final cut, and the film was a commercial and critical disappointment. Of the released film, Ellroy told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, "Look, you’re not going to get me to say anything negative about the movie, so you might as well give up."[17] He had, however, mocked the film's director, cast, and production design before it was filmed.[30]
In 2008, Daily Variety reported that HBO, along with Tom Hanks's production company, Playtone, was developing American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand for either a miniseries or ongoing series.[31]
Ellroy co-wrote the original screenplay for the 2008 film Street Kings but refused to do any publicity for the finished film.[17]
In a 2009 interview, Ellroy himself stated, "All movie adaptations of my books are dead."[32

James Ellroy (nee Lee Earle Ellroy) was born in Los Angeles in 1948. His mother was a nurse and his father, when he did work, was an accountant, among other things.
When his parents divorced in 1954, his mother got custody and moved to El Monte (a low income area in L.A). His mother was murdered there in 1958.
James Ellroy's attempt to solve this still unsolved murder was the subject of his 1996 nonfiction work My Dark Places. After his mother's death, he moved in with his father.
Ellroy claims to have been turned on to crime fiction by the Hardy Boys. At the age of ten, his father bought him Jack Webb's The Badge:a history of the LAPD. He became obsessed with the book and studied it repeatedly. In this book, he discovered the story of the Black Dahlia, as well as the cops and crime figures he would later write about in the L.A. Quartet.
Ellroy went to high school in the largely Jewish city of Fairfax. As an attention-starved adolescent, he mailed Nazi pamphlets to girls he liked, criticized JFK and advocated the reinstatement of slavery.Amazingly, he claims to have received only one schoolyard beating for his anti-Semitic hijinks. He was a big fan of "The Fugitive" TV series in the early sixties and was obsessed with crime novels and movies in his late teens. When he wasn't reading crime novels, he was shoplifting food and porno magazines. At this time, his father suffered from a stroke and he reluctantly stepped into the caregiver role.
He was eventually expelled from Fairfax high school for ranting about Nazism in his English class. Soon after, he joined the army.
Realizing that he didn't belong in the army and worried about his father, he faked a stutter and convinced the army psychiatrist that he was not mentally fit for combat. After three months, he received a dishonorable discharge.
Soon after returning home to L.A., his father died in the hospital. His last words: "Try to pick up every waitress who serves you."
After his father's death, he moved into his own apartment on the money the army paid him. He landed himself in juvenile hall trying to steal a steak from a Liquor & Food Mart. When he got out, his friend's father, who Ellroy called a "right-wing crackpot" became his guardian.
When he turned eighteen, he was back on the streets again. He lived in parks and Goodwill bins. He broke into the homes of girls he liked and stole their underwear. He drank, experimented with drugs, and read hundreds of crime novels. He discovered Benzedrex, a sinus inhaler. Instead of inhaling it, he would swallow it to get a speed high.
When it got cold he would move into vacant apartments. The police caught him doing this once, and threw him in jail. When he got out of jail, he got a job at an adult book store and loaded up on magazines. The women reminded him of his mother and the Black Dahlia.
The Benzedex drove him to near schizophrenia and the alcohol was destroying his health. He suffered from pneumonia twice and developed what his doctor called "post-alcohol brain syndrome." Fearing for his sanity, he joined AA and got sober. He earned steady money as a golf caddy and began to mentally formulate a mystery plot, which would become Brown's Requiem.
At the age of thirty, he wrote and sold his first novel. James Ellroy currently lives in Kansas City.

- بعد خروجه من الجيش وعودته الى لوس انجلس مات والده
- واصبح والد صديقة مسؤول عن رعايته حوكم وسجن بسبب سرقة قطعة لحمة
- عندما بغل الثامنة عشره عاد الى الشوارع
- كان يقتحم بيوت الصبايا التي يحبهن ويسرق ملابسهن الداخليه
- كان يشر الخمر وجرب المخدرات وقرأة الاف الروايات البوليسية
- سجن لنومه في شقق فارغه غير مسكونه

طفولة كارثية ، طلاق الوالدين وهو في سن السادسة، ثم مقتل الام وهو في سن العاشرة، ثم ترك المدرسة الثانوية، ثم انضمام الى الجيش، ثم ترك الجيش بحجة انه مريض نفسيا...كآبة حادة وخلل في المشاعر بسبب قتل الام، ثم موت الاب، ثم السجن ثم التشرد ولا ننسى المخدرات والادمان على الكحول والسرقة المتكررة والسجن المتكرر.
حياة بؤش وشقاء والم لا مثيل لها الا في القصص والروايات.

96. Wise Children Angela Carter- A theatrical extravaganza by a brilliant exponent of magic realism.

Angela Carter wrote this novel after she knew she had been diagnosed with cancer. She had a small son and a husband whom she would be leaving behind and in this context, Deefholts notes, "The echoing refrain of the text -- "What a joy it is to dance and sing!" -- seems particularly potent."

Plot summary

The story begins on the 75th birthday of twin sisters, Dora and Nora Chance. By what Dora, who is also the narrator of the story, describes as a bizarre coincidence, it is also the 100th birthday of their natural father, Melchior Hazard, and his twin brother, Peregrine Hazard, who is believed to be dead. The date is similarly Shakespeare's birthday - April 23.
Dora and Nora's birthday gets off to a dramatic start when their half-brother, Tristram Hazard, who believes himself to be the nephew of the twins, arrives on their doorstep. He announces that Tiffany - his partner, and the goddaughter of the twins, is missing. Dora and Nora soon discover that Tiffany is pregnant with Tristram's baby, but he is unwilling to take on the responsibility. Once this bombshell has been dropped, it soon emerges that a body has been found, and it is believed to be Tiffany's.
Most of the novel consists of Dora's memories. As well as providing the backstory of her natural father, Melchior Hazard, her legal father, Peregrine Hazard, and her guardian, Grandma Chance, Dora describes key events of her life. These include her early theatreperformances, how she and her sister deal with being rejected by their father, as well as the time that she spent in Hollywood, producing a film version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It also makes the reader wonder about a sexual and incestuous relationship between Peregrine and Dora as there are hints that some sexual activity took place on the Brighton trip, but Carter does not clear this mystery up.
Dora and Nora attend Melchior's 100th birthday party, where he acknowledges they are his children for the first time in their lives. The twins learn that both Peregrine and Tiffany are alive, and the true nature of their long-time enemies, Saskia and Imogen, is revealed.
The novel ends with Dora and Nora being presented with twin babies to look after - a gift from Peregrine. They realise that they "can't afford" to die for another twenty years, as they want to see the children grow up. The final line of the story is a message constantly conveyed by Carter throughout the novel: "What a joy it is to dance and sing!"

Main characters

· Dora Chance - 75 years of age, minor theatre and film star, illegitimate daughter of Melchior Hazard and "Pretty Kitty", who dies in childbirth. Believed by outsiders to be the daughter of Peregrine Hazard.
· Nora Chance - Twin sister and best friend of Dora.
· Melchior Hazard - High-profile theatre and film star, known for putting career before his family.
· Peregrine Hazard - Twin brother of Melchior, who raises Nora and Dora. Adventurer, explorer, actor. Embodies magic realism and the carnivalesque.
· Lady Atalanta Hazard (Wheelchair) - First wife of Melchior Hazard, mother of Saskia and Imogen. In her later life, she is cared for by Nora and Dora after her daughters push her down a staircase and take all her money
· Delia Delaney (Daisy Duck) - Actress, second wife of Melchior Hazard, and former lover of Peregrine Hazard. Later marries Puck from the production of 'Midsummer Night's Dream.'
· My Lady Margarine - Third wife of Melchior Hazard. Mother to Gareth and Tristram. Known as "Lady Margarine" because she stars in a margarine advert on TV.
· Grandma Chance - Guardian of Dora and Nora Chance. Peregrine suggests that Grandma Chance may have been Dora and Nora's mother, but Dora considers this unlikely. Nudist and vegetarian. She is also against picking flowers, believing it to be cruel.
· Saskia Hazard - Legal daughter of Melchior Hazard. TV chef. Cunning and ambitious. Has an ongoing relationship with Tristram, her half brother. Nemesis of Dora Chance. Assumed by Nora and Dora to be the biological daughter of Peregrine Hazard.
· Imogen Hazard - Legal daughter of Melchior Hazard, twin sister of Saskia Hazard. Plays a fish on a children's TV program.
· Tristram Hazard - Son of Melchior Hazard's third marriage. Presenter of "Lashings of Lolly." Twin brother of Gareth.
· Tiffany - Goddaughter of Dora and Nora Chance. Girlfriend of Tristram Hazard, with whom she hosts "Lashings of Lolly", a TV gameshow. Also pregnant with Tristram's baby.

Dramatis personae

Born Angela Olive Stalker in Eastbourne, in 1940,
ولدت عام 1940 وكان اسمها انجلا اولف ستولكر

Carter was evacuated as a child to live in Yorkshire with her maternal grandmother.
تم ارسالها لتعيش مع جدتها وهي طفلة صغيرة ربما بسبب الحرب العالمية الثانية ومخاطرها حيث تم استخدام كلمة ( ترحيل ) في وصف الاجراء

As a teenager she battled anorexia.
اصيبت وهي شابة بمرض فقدان الشهيه

She began work as a journalist on the Croydon Advertiser, following in the footsteps of her father. Carter attended the University of Bristol where she studied English literature.
درست الادب الانجليزي في جامعة برستول

She married twice, first in 1960 to Paul Carter.
تزوجت مرتين الاولى لشخص اسمه بول كارتر عام 1960 وعمرها 20 سنة

They divorced after twelve years. In 1969 Angela Carter used the proceeds of her Somerset Maugham Award to leave her husband and relocate for two years to Tokyo, Japan, where she claims in Nothing Sacred (1982) that she "learnt what it is to be a woman and became radicalised."
بعد طلاقها من زوجها سافرت الى اليابان وعاشت هناك عامان

She wrote about her experiences there in articles for New Society and a collection of short stories, Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1974), and evidence of her experiences in Japan can also be seen in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972).
She then explored the United States, Asia and Europe, helped by her fluency in French and German. She spent much of the late 1970s and 1980s as a writer in residence at universities, including the University of Sheffield, Brown University, the University of Adelaide, and the University of East Anglia.
سافرت الى عدة بلدان مثل الولايات المتحدة واسيا واوروبا

In 1977 Carter married Mark Pearce, with whom she had one son.
As well as being a prolific writer of fiction, Carter contributed many articles to The Guardian, The Independent and New Statesman, collected in Shaking a Leg. She adapted a number of her short stories for radio and wrote two original radio dramas on Richard Dadd and Ronald Firbank. Two of her fictions have been adapted for the silver screen: The Company of Wolves (1984) and The Magic Toyshop (1987). She was actively involved in both film adaptations, her screenplays are published in the collected dramatic writings, The Curious Room, together with her radio scripts, a libretto for an opera of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, an unproduced screenplay entitled The Christchurch Murders (based on the same true story as Peter Jackson'sHeavenly Creatures) and other works. These neglected works, as well as her controversial television documentary, The Holy Family Album, are discussed in Charlotte Crofts' book, Anagrams of Desire (2003). Her novel Nights at the Circus won the 1984 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for literature.
At the time of her death, Carter had started work on a sequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre based on the later life of Jane's stepdaughter, Adèle Varens; only a synopsis survives.
Angela Carter died aged 51 in 1992 at her home in London after developing lung cancer.

· Shadow Dance (1966) aka Honeybuzzard
· The Magic Toyshop (1967)
· Several Perceptions (1968)
· Heroes and Villains (1969)
· Love (1971)
· The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972) aka The War of Dreams
· The Passion of New Eve (1977)
· Nights at the Circus (1984)
· Wise Children (1991)

· Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1974) aka Fireworks: Nine Stories in Various Disguises and Fireworks
· The Bloody Chamber (1979)
· The Bridegroom (1983) (Uncollected short story)
· Black Venus (1985)
· American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (1993)
· Burning Your Boats (1995)

· Five Quiet Shouters (1966)
· Unicorn (1966)

· Come Unto These Yellow Sands: Four Radio Plays (1985)
· The Curious Room: Plays, Film Scripts and an Opera (1996) (includes Carter's screenplays for adaptations of The Company of Wolves and The Magic Toyshop; also includes the contents of Come Unto These Golden Sands: Four Radio Plays)
· The Holy Family Album (1991)

· The Donkey Prince (1970) illustrated by Eros Keith
· Miss Z, the Dark Young Lady (1970) illustrated by Eros Keith
· Comic and Curious Cats (1979) illustrated by Martin Leman
· Moonshadow (1982) illustrated by Justin Todd
· Sea-Cat and Dragon King (2000) illustrated by Eva Tatcheva

· The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (1979)
· Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings (1982)
· Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings (1992)
· Shaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and Writing (1997)
She wrote two entries in "A Hundred Things Japanese" copyright 1975 by the Japan Culture Institute. ISBN 0870403648 It says "She has lived in Japan both from 1969 to 1971 and also during 1974" (p 202).

· Wayward Girls and Wicked Women: An Anthology of Subversive Stories (1986)
· The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1990) aka The Old Wives' Fairy Tale Book
· The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1992) aka Strange Things Still Sometimes Happen: Fairy Tales From Around the World (1993)
· Angela Carter's Book of Fairy Tales (2005) (collects the two Virago Books above)

· The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (1977)
· Sleeping Beauty and Other Favourite Fairy Tales (1982) (Perrault stories and two Madame Leprince de Beaumont stories)

· Company of Wolves (1984) adapted by Carter with Neil Jordan from her short story of the same name, "Wolf-Alice" and "The Werewolf"
· The Magic Toyshop (1987) adapted by Carter from her novel of the same name

· Vampirella (1976) written by Carter and directed by Glyn Dearman for BBC. Formed the basis for the short story "The Lady of the House of Love".
· Come Unto These Yellow Sands (1979)
· The Company of Wolves (1980) adapted by Carter from her short story of the same name, "Wolf-Alice" and "The Werewolf", and directed by Glyn Dearman for BBC
· Puss-in-Boots (1982) adapted by Carter from her short story and directed by Glyn Dearman for BBC
· A Self-Made Man (1984)

English short story writer, novelist, journalist, dramatist and critic. Carter was a notable exponent of magic realism, adding into it Gothic themes, postmodernist eclecticism, violence, and eroticism. Throughout her career, Carter utilized the language and characteristic motifs of the fantasy genre. "A good writer can make you believe time stands still," she once said. Her work represents a successful combination of post-modern literary theories and feminist politics. Carter died in 1992 at the age of fifty-one.
"-Then the city vanished; it ceased, almost immediately, to be a magic and appalling place. I woke up one morning and found it had become a home. Though I still turn up my coat collar in a lonely way and am always looking at myself in mirrors, they're only habits and give no clue at all to my character, whatever that is.
--The most difficult performance in the world is acting naturally, isn't it? Everything else is artful." (from 'Flesh and the Mirror' in Fireworks, 1974)
Angela Olive Stalker was born in Eastbourne, Sussex, to Olive (Farthing) Stalker and Hugh Alexander Stalker, a journalist.
During the war years, she was removed by her grandmother to South Yorkshire.
After rejoining her mother she suffered from anorexia.
However, Carter has described her childhood as carefree: "life passed at a languorous pace, everything was gently untidy, and none of the clocks ever told the right time".
At the age of 20 she married Paul Carter, and moved with him to Bristol.
Before starting her English studies at the University of Bristol, Carter worked for the Croydon Advertiser and wrote features and record reviews. After graduating, she began her literary career.
Carter's first novel, SHADOW DANCE (1966), was a kind of detective story, written during a summer vacation. THE MAGIC TOYSHOP (1967) developed further the themes of sexual fantasy and revealed Carter's fascination with fairy tales and the Freudian unconscious.
It tells a modern myth of an orphaned girl and the horrors she experiences, when she goes to live with her uncle and grows through a rite of passage into adulthood.
روايتها الثانية تحكي قصة طفلة يتيمة والرعب الذي تختبره عندما تذهب لتعيش مع عمها وربما ان هذه التجربة هو ما حصل معها شخصيا حتى ولو كان ذلك الشعور ناتج عن البعد عن العائلة بعد ان تم ارسالها لتعيش مع جدتها بسبب الحرب
The book won the Jon Llwellyn Rhys Prize in 1967. For SEVERAL PERCEPTIONS (1968) Carter received the Somerset Maugham Award. THE INFERNAL DESIRE MACHINES OF DOCTOR HOFFMAN (1973) was a story of a war fought against a diabolic doctor, whose aim is to demolish the structures of reason with his gigantic generators. "I can date to that time and to that sense of heightened awareness of the society around me in the summer of 1968, my own questioning of the nature of my reality as a woman. How that social fiction of my "femininity" was created, by means outside my control, and palmed off on me as the real thing."
In 1970, having separated from her husband, Carter went to live in Japan for two years. During this period she worked at many different jobs, among others as a bar hostess. The experience of a different culture had a strong influence on her work. In 1979 Carter published THE SADETAN WOMAN, where she questioned culturally accepted views of sexuality, and sadistic and masochistic relations between men and women. Surprising some of her readers, Carter defended the Marquis de Sade's images of women. After this novel Carter's fiction was described by some less enthusiastic critics as "entertainment for boys and girls who like their De Sade mixed with Suchard chocolate."
In the late 1980s Carter's writings occupied a central position within debates about feminist pluralism and post-modernism. In her novels Carter dramatized how the old orders of the Western world were breaking down. "I am the pure product of an advanced, industrialized, post-imperialist country in decline,'' she wrote. Her interest in changing gender roles formed the basis for novels HEROES AND VILLAINS (1969), set in the post-holocaust world, and THE PASSIONS OF NEW EVE (1977). The protagonist, Evelyn, comes to a futuristic New York, the City of Dreadful Night, where Leilah performs a dance of chaos for him. Evelyn finds his promised job extinguished. He undergoes deranging adventures and is captured in the desert by a cold-blooded female scientist, who calls herself Mother and has assembled in her person various attributes of the goddess. She intends to rape Evelyn, change his sex, and impregnate him with his own seed, so that he may give birth to an ambivalent new messiah. In the end, Eve, having transcended the various impersonations s/he has passed through metamorphosis, takes ship westward, en route maybe to Eden. In Heroes and Villains professors and scientist live in guarded cities. Outside live tribes of Barbarians. Marianne escapes from the city to the wilds and is adopted by a Barbarian tribe.
Concern with sexual politics was central to Carter's burlesque-picaresque novel NIGHTS AT THE CIRCUS (1984), which first begins in a gaslight-romance version of London, moves for a period to Siberia, and returns home. Fevvers, the heroine, is not like other people, she has wings, but her freedom to fly is limited on the stage. In this work the dystopia of The Passions of New Eve is replaced by humor and re-creation of the 19th-century bourgeois novel. Her other works include translations of Charles Perrault's fairy tales (1979), BLOODY CHAMBER (1979), a collection of stories retelling classic fairy tales, and an anthology of subversive stories by women. Samples of her journalism are collected in NOTHING SACRED (1982) and EXPLETIVES DELETED (1992). Carter's screenplay for THE COMPANY OF WOLVES (1984), based on THE BLOODY CHAMBER (1979) was a bloodthirsty, Freudian retelling of the 'Little Red Riding Hood' story, directed by Neil Jordan. This visually groundbreaking film studied the wolf-girl relationship in the light of sexual awakening. Re-writing fairy-tales from a feminist point of view, Carter argued that one can find from both literature and folklore "the old lies on which new lies are based." However, her critics saw that using the old form, Carter produced the "rigidly sexist psychology of the erotic".
BLACK VENUS (1985) featured Carter's fictionalization of historical characters, such as Lizzie Borden and Baudelaire's syphilitic mistress. In 1987 Carter was called in New Socialist the "high-priestess of post-graduate porn." WISE CHILDREN (1991), her last novel, which focused on the female members of a theatrical family, was was marked by optimism and humor. Dora and Nora Chance, the "wise children" of the title, are twins, illegitimate daughters of an famous Shakespearean actor. The story is narrated by Dora Chance, already an old dame:. "Sometimes I think, if I look hard enough, I can see back into the past. There goes the wind, again. Crash. Over goes the dustbin, all the trash spills out... empty cat-food cans, cornflakes packets, laddered tights, tea leaves... I am at present working on my memoirs and researching family history - see the word processor, the filing cabinet, the card indexes, right hand, left hand, right side, left side, all the dirt on everybody. What a wind!" Full of references to Shakespeare's plays, the characters of the novel have similarities with Shakespearean characters and scenes, but Carter also challenges the reader's narrative expectations.
Carter taught, and was writer-in-residence at universities in America and Australia, and spent two years in Japan, writing essays for New Society. For 20 years she was a major contributor to the magazine, the current affairs and culture weekly, which is now part of the New Statesman. Durin the period 1976-78, Carter served as Arts Council fellow at Sheffield University, England. She was also a visiting professor of creative writing at Brown University, Rhode Island, USA, taught in Australia and at East Anglia University, UK, and held writing residences at Austin, Texas; Iowa City, Iowa, and Albaby, New York State in America. She died of cancer on February 16, 1992, in London. "English literature has lost its high sorceress, its benevolent witch queen," wrote Salman Rushdie. BURNING YOUR BOATS, a collection of the author's short stories, appeared in 1996 with an introduction by Rushdie. Her journalism was collected under the title SHAKING A LEG (1998). Carter often wrote as if she was a fearless tourist examining oddities of the Western culture, and asked such unfeigned questions as ''why is a nice girl like Simone [Beauvoir] wasting her time sucking up to . . . boring old . . . J.-P.? [Jean-Paul Sartre].'' Merja Makinen has called Carter in her essay 'Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and the Decolonisation of Feminine Sexuality' the "avant-garde literary terrorist of feminism." (see Angela Carter, ed. by Alison Easton, 2000) "The amazing thing about her, for me, was that someone who looked so much like the Fairy Godmother... should actually be so much like the Fairy Godmother," wrote Margaret Atwood of Carter in the Observer.
she was diagnosed with lung cancer in the year 1991, the same year she published her novel Wise Children, and passed away the year after at the age of 52. She was named one of the most examined of English writers fifteen years after her premature death.
ماتت عام 1991 بسبب سرطان الرئة