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The Stone Door

The Stone Door

by Leonora Carrington

$15.95
$15.95
Available as E-Book British & Irish Literature
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The Stone Door is an omen, an incantation, and an adventure story rolled into one. Built in layers like a puzzle box, it is the tale of two people, of love and the Zodiac and the Kabbalah, of Transylvania and Mesopotamia converging at the Caucasus, of a mad Hungarian King named Böles Kilary and of a woman’s discovery of an initiatory code that leads to a Cyclopean obstacle, to love, self, and awareness, to the great stone door of Kescke and beyond.

Written at the end of World War II but not published until 1977 and long unavailable, The Stone Door is at once a celebration of the union of Carrington and her husband, the Hungarian-born photographer Chiki Weisz, and an argument for the unification of the male and the female as a means of liberating the human race.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781681378947
Pages: 136
Publication Date:

Praise

[Carrington’s] work with its vibrant dehumanized animals, its mythic universality, and mysterious lucidity remains a marvel. She was and remains forever rad.
—Joy Williams, Book Post

The magically unfolding fable tells of Zacharias, a twentieth-century Hungarian Jew who is destined to voyage beyond the boundaries of time to the shores of ancient Mesopotamia, and open the great stone door of the mountain Kescke to release his true love. This modern fairy tale burns with passion and purpose.
—Publishers Weekly

The Stone Door is arguably Carrington’s most probing, and also perhaps the most earnest, fictional inquiry into alternative modes of representation.... In true surrealist fashion, the novel calls both for a social revolution and a psychological one.
—Anna Watz

One of the reasons that I love The Stone Door is its duality of the mystical and the earthly at the same time. When I read this work, I’m traveling through these places and landscapes. The elements. Carrington includes everything, and that’s what I’m drawn to in her work. It’s spiritual, it’s political, it’s life-affirming.
—Stacy Klein

Carrington's novella, The Stone Door, tells the story of a quest undertaken by the boy, Zacharias, to enter the country of the Dead, and reads like a hashish dream.... [The Stone Door] may send the surrealists among us into backflips.
—Kirkus Reviews

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