Black Venus is an anthology of short fiction by Angela Carter

Angela Carter

Angela Carter was an English novelist and journalist, known for her feminist, magical realism, and picaresque works...

. It was first published in the United Kingdom in 1985 by Chatto & Windus Ltd. and contains a collection of eight stories, the majority of which are concerned with re-imagining the lives of certain figures in history, with a particular emphasis on those who well known through literature, for example Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the nineteenth century...

.

Stories included are "Black Venus", "The Kiss", "Our Lady of the Massacre", "The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...

", "Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night's Dream", "Peter and the Wolf", "The Kitchen Child" and "The Fall River Axe Murders".

The anthology's contents are also reprinted in the volume Burning Your Boats

Burning Your Boats

Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories is a posthumously-published collection of Angela Carter's short stories. It includes stories previously collected in her other short story collections: Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces , The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories , Black Venus and American...

, which features all of Carter's short fiction.