Leonora Carringtonová

Ring for your maid, and when she comes in we'll pounce upon her and tear off her face. I'll wear her face tonight instead of mine.' These dreamlike, carnivalesque fables by one of the leading lights of the Surrealist movement are masterpieces of invention and grand-guignol humour. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

An illustrated biography of the remarkable and pioneering artist Leonora Carrington, told through the houses and locations that had meaning for her and are fundamental to an understanding of her work. An evocative visual chronicle on the life of Leonora Carrington as seen through interiors, international locations and vintage photographs, this book leads the reader on a personal journey through the many spaces she inhabited and which infused and haunted her art and the people she knew. Long underrated, Carrington is now considered as one of the vanguard, not only in histories of women artists but also Surrealism; her interests - feminism, ecology and life-enhancing art - are now shared by many. Challenging the conventions of her time, Carrington abandoned family, society and England to embrace new experiences and mix with artists in Europe and America, and to forge her own unique artistic style. From Lancashire to London, Cornwall to France and Spain, then to Mexico, New York and finally back to Mexico, each place and interior became etched in her memory - whether her grandmother's kitchen with its giant stove, Parisian cafés, a rural French hideaway, the sanatorium in Santander or her Mexican sanctuary - only to be echoed, sometimes decades later, in her paintings and writings. 'Houses are really bodies,' she wrote in her novella The Hearing Trumpet (1974), 'We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh and blood streams.'