Red Shoes and Other Tattered Tales

By Karen Elizabeth Gordon

Book Overview

Best known for her Gothic language handbooks (reissued recently as The New Well-Tempered Sentence and The Deluxe Transitive Vampire), Karen Elizabeth Gordon here turns her extraordinary talents to fiction, and the result is as unconventional as her seductive grammar dramas. The Red Shoes consists of tatters of a half-dozen tales ( The Glass Shoe, The Gingerbread Variations, The Little Match Girl, Don Juan Is a Woman, and the title story, among others) sewn together into a novel by two seamstresses. Fabric, fabrication such is the stuff of these lost chronicles come together here, Gordon writes in her introduction. Swinging their hatboxes, swaying their hips, chapters with torn slips wander in on high heels and blistered feet. Looking back to the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, but also casting sidelong glances at metafictional sugardaddies like Queneau, Nabokov, Cortazar, Gass, and Milorad Pavic, The Red Shoes is a Rabelaisian romp through the language of sensuality."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1564780929
• ISBN13: 9781564780928
• Release Date: March 1996
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.5"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Among the best

A beauty in words interwoven with thoughts gives this book a upper slab than many others in the category.A reader-oriented book gets more welcome than fictions whics gives an extra score to this book.A nice one to read.