Written largely out of Carter’s years in Japan, Fireworks is her first collection of short fiction.

It contains nine stories about travel, erotic estrangement and autobiography, however with Carter's characteristic flair, they repeatedly tip into fable, nightmare and grotesque theatre. Tokyo becomes a hall of mirrors for an Englishwoman confronting desire and her own foreignness; elsewhere, murderous puppets, predatory lovers, forests and doubled bodies turn gender into something performed, exchanged and violently enforced.

First published in 1974, the collection sits between Carter’s early novels and the more famous fairy-tale revisions of The Bloody Chamber. It is rawer and less orderly than that later book, but crucial to understanding how her feminism developed: women appear as dolls, monsters, commodities and desiring subjects, often all at once. The prose is lush, abrasive and knowingly excessive. Best for readers who like Carter at her most hallucinatory, or fiction in which sexuality and identity cease behaving like stable facts. 

Virago paperback, 1987 revised edition. Good condition with light cover rubbing, edge wear and minor corner wear.