Books like Strange things sometimes still happen by Angela Carter

Angela Carter’s *The Bloody Chamber* reshapes classic fairy tales—such as *Little Red Riding Hood*, *Bluebeard*, *Puss in Boots*, and *Beauty and the Beast*—into seductive, Gothic‑styled narratives that both subvert and celebrate traditional myths.

When the famous wrestler Forever Mountain is tickled by a plump little girl, he must be trained by her family to understand courtship and humility, following a tale told by the emperor.

Angela Carter's 1977 novel satirically depicts a dystopian United States torn apart by civil war among political, racial, and gender groups, exploring post‑feminist ideas of gender and identity alongside themes of sadomasochism and power politics.

Marina Warner looks at storytelling, at its practitioners and images in art, legend, and history - from the prophesying enchantresses who lure men to a false paradise to jolly Mother Goose, with her masqueraders in the real world, from sibyls and the Queen of Sheba to Angela Carter. The storytellers are frequently women (or were until men like Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen started writing down the women's stories), and Marina Warner asks how changing prejudices about women affect the status of fairy tales: are they sources of wisdom and moral guidance, or temptations encouraging indulgence in romantic and vengeful fantasies? From the Beast to the Blonde considers old wives' tales in all their luxuriant detail and with a strong sense of the historical contexts in which they developed. Ms. Warner's fresh new interpretations show us how the real-life themes in these famous stories evolved: rivalry and hatred between women ("Cinderella" and "The Sleeping Beauty"), the ways of men and marriage ("Bluebeard" and "Beauty and the Beast"), not to mention neglect, incest, death in childbirth, murder, and racial prejudice. As she suggests in her superb closing chapter, happy endings come only after stumbles and falls; yet in some sense the story of tale-telling is never done.

Angela Carter’s Wise Children follows twin vaudeville stars Dora and Nora Chance as they recall a glittering early‑twentieth‑century career and their complex relationship to their illegitimate father, Sir Melchior Hazard, in a lyrical family saga.

In this satirical, erotically charged fantasy, a cityer falls for Doctor Hoffman's glass‑clad daughter while confronting his reality‑warping inventions, cannibals, and surreal creatures across distorted time and space.

This book offers a historicizing perspective on the question of gender in fairy tales, focusing on past and present versions of four classic stories in order to analyze their varying representations of women.