Ten New Angela Carters
(New Angela Carters, I mean, in the same way that singer-songwriters were once billed as “new Bob Dylans.” It’s meant to signify the inheritance of a sensibility. Carter’s work seems unusually relevant to our moment—I could increase this list to a hundred without exhausting the possibilities—even if, while she was alive, “she somehow never quite had her due.” My judgements here are mostly instinctual, but I think what Carter shares in common with most of these writers is an attraction to the deeper currents of the fairy tale, a willingness to blend the beautiful with the horrific, and an openness to both the erotic and the political in fiction. I’ve arranged these writers in something like their birth order, adding what I consider to be their most Carter-like title in parentheses.)
Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses)
Graham Joyce (The Tooth Fairy)
Jeanette Winterson (Sexing the Cherry)
Lydia Millet (My Happy Life)
Kelly Link (Stranger Things Happen)
Theodora Goss (In the Forest of Forgetting)
Kate Bernheimer (The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold)
Joanna Walsh (Grow a Pair: 9½ Fairy Tales About Sex)
Helen Oyeyemi (Boy, Snow, Bird)
Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties)
— January 11, 2022