the complete stories of leonora carrington

Spanning nearly 35 years-roughly from 1937 to 1971-Carrington’s stories are at once entirely set in their surrealist ways and yet still prove elastic enough to accommodate the global and cultural changes visited upon the middle of the 20th century. Dorothy, in other words, has constructed its small-press identity around the dutiful memorializing of authors in need of discovery or, in Carrington’s case, recovery. The project is also largely responsible for discovering (and catapulting to fame) now big-press player, Nell Zink. In addition, the press frequently takes chances on more experimental fiction and poetry by lesser-known or early-career women authors: consider Nathalie Léger’s long creative essay on Barbara Loden’s 1970 film Wanda or Suzanne Scanlon’s novelized story fragments. Carrington’s Collected Stories is their third reissue-following works by Barbara Comyns and Marianne Fritz-and the project’s fifteenth release overall. Since 2010, Dorothy (full name “Dorothy, a publishing project”) has published two “works of fiction or near fiction or about fiction, mostly by women” annually, every October.

As the titular character of “The Happy Corpse Story” warns, “‘Sentimentality is a form of fatigue.’”įortunately for us, Dorothy shares no such values. Still, this slight stack of pages that Carrington left behind feels utterly consonant with the ephemeral quality of the stories themselves, unconcerned with and often outright disdainful toward the impulse to monumentalize. Of course, none of those writers were quite the multi-hyphenate that surrealist author, painter, sculptor, and political radical Carrington was. For comparison, a glance over to my own bookshelf shows that Stefan Zweig’s 22 collected stories span over 700 pages, Lucia Berlin’s mere selections total over 400, and Deborah Eisenberg’s doorstop of a collection falls just shy of 1000 pages. Her Complete Stories, reissued by Dorothy in a beautiful book of squat, almost square pages with big text and even bigger margins, barely crosses the 200-page mark. 215 pp.īy my roughly crunched count, Leonora Carrington’s complete literary output totals just over 600 pages of writing.

Louis, MO: Dorothy, a publishing project, 2017.

The complete stories of leonora carrington