Sub-Rosa is a reading group that meets once a month to discuss feminist and obscure literature.
Our selection for this month is The Stone Door by Leonara Carrington.
We will meet Saturday, September 20 at 6:30 p.m. at the store.
If you are interested in attending please send us your email to bookbeatorders@gmail.com, message Book Beat on Instagram, or inquire in-store.
Books will be in stock soon and discounted 15%. A reminder will be sent once books are available.
Ancient Mesopotamia, the Zodiac, and the land of the dead feature in this wildly surrealistic adventure story—Leonora Carrington’s revolutionary second novel, long out of print.
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 the surrealist painter Leonora 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.
“[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 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
Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) was born in Lancashire, England, to an industrialist father and an Irish mother. She was raised on fantastical folktales told to her by her Irish nanny at her family’s estate, Crookhey Hall. A renowned artist as well as a writer, she lived a majority of her life in Mexico City, moving in a circle of like-minded artists that included Remedios Varo and Alejandro Jodorowsky. Her surrealistic paintings and sculptures have been hosted in galleries and museums all over the world. A novel, The Hearing Trumpet; a memoir of madness, Down Below; and an illustrated group of stories for children, The Milk of Dreams, are all available from New York Review Books.