The Debutante and Other Stories

A debutante frees a hyena from the zoo so that it might take her place at her coming-out ball; an artist paints a portrait of a man s dead wife, but finds she has painted herself instead; a woman makes love to a boar underneath a mountain of cats; a chicken is roasted with the brains and livers of thrushes, truffles, crushed sweet almonds, rose conserve and drops of divine liqueur; two noble sisters wonder whether anybody can be a person of quality if they wash away their ghosts with common sense ; a psychoanalyst must decide what to do with the gift of a team of Russian rats trained to operate on humans. In this first complete edition of English-born Leonora Carrington's short stories, written throughout her life from her years in Surrealist Paris to her late period in Dirty War-era Mexico City, the world is by turns subversive, funny, sly, wise and disarming.