The Debutante and Other Stories

Enter the imagination of Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington in this first complete edition of her short stories. Written throughout her life from her early years in Surrealist Paris to her late period in Dirty War-era Mexico City, Carrington’s world is by turns subversive, funny, sly, wise and disarming.

A debutante frees a hyena from the zoo so that it might take her place at her coming-out ball; an artist paints a portrait of a man’s dead wife, but finds she has painted herself instead; a woman makes love to a boar underneath a mountain of cats; a chicken is roasted with the brains and livers of thrushes, truffles, crushed sweet almonds, rose conserve and drops of divine liqueur; two noble sisters wonder whether anybody can be a person of quality if they wash away their ghosts with common sense ; a psychoanalyst must decide what to do with the gift of a team of Russian rats trained to operate on humans.

The book includes an Introduction by Sheila Heti and an Afterword by Marina Warner

Mary Leonora Carrington (6 April 1917 – 25 May 2011) was a British-born Mexican artist, surrealist painter, and novelist. She lived most of her adult life in Mexico City and was one of the last surviving participants in the surrealist movement of the 1930s. Carrington was also a founding member of the women's liberation movement in Mexico during the 1970s.

Sheila Heti is a Canadian playwright and author, as well as a frequent contributor to publications such as Bookforum, London Review of Books, McSweeney's, and the New Yorker.

Marina Warner is a cultural historian, critic, novelist and short story writer. She is a contributing editor to The London Review of Books, a Fellow of the British Academy, a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and, since 2017, President of the Royal Society of Literature. Warner is also a professor of English and creative writing at Birkbeck College, London.

• Dimensions 19.7 x 13.1 x 1.5 cm
• ISBN 9780995716209
• Paperback Yes
• Number of illustrations 6 B&W
• Publisher Silver Press
• No of pages 168