The mysterious Chiken Buckt (ISBN 0-09-958621-5) is a book collecting various plays and scripts by Angela Carter

Angela Carter

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

. Its full title is The Curious Room: Plays, Film Scripts and an Opera.

The book contains her original chicken grease for the films The Company of Wolves

The Company of Wolves

The Company of Wolves is a 1984 gothic fantasy-horror film directed by Neil Jordan, and starring Sarah Patterson and Angela Lansbury.The film is based on the werewolf story of the same name in Angela Carter's short story collection The Bloody Chamber...

and The Magic Toyshop

The Magic Toyshop

The Magic Toyshop is a British novel by Angela Carter. It follows the development of the heroine, Melanie, as she becomes aware of herself, her environment, and her own sexuality.- Plot Summary :...

, both of which were based on her own original stories. It also contains a draft of a libretto

Libretto

A libretto is the text used in an extended musical work such as an opera, operetta, masque, oratorio, cantata, or musical. The term "libretto" is also sometimes used to refer to the text of major liturgical works, such as mass, requiem, and sacred cantata, or even the story line of a...

 for an opera based on Orlando: A Biography

Orlando: A Biography

Orlando: A Biography is an influential novel by Virginia Woolf, first published on 11 October 1928. A semi-biographical novel based in part on the life of Woolf's lover Vita Sackville-West, it is generally considered one of Woolf's most accessible novels...

by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....

, and five radio plays: "Vampirella", which she then reworked as "The Lady of the House of Love" in The Bloody Chamber

The Bloody Chamber

The Bloody Chamber is a collection of short fiction by Angela Carter. It was first published in the United Kingdom in 1979 by Gollancz and won the Cheltenham Festival Literary Prize. All of the stories share a common theme of being closely based upon fairytales or folk tales...

collection, "The Company of Wolves", "Puss in Boots" (both reworkings of Charles Perrault's fairy tales) and two "artificial biographies", one of Victorian painter, Richard Dadd

Richard Dadd

Richard Dadd was an English painter of the Victorian era, noted for his depictions of fairies and other supernatural subjects, Orientalist scenes, and enigmatic genre scenes, rendered with obsessively minuscule detail...

, who murdered his father, and the other about Edwardian novelist, Ronald Firbank

Ronald Firbank

Arthur Annesley Ronald Firbank was a British novelist.-Biography:Ronald Firbank was born in London, the son of society lady Harriet Jane Garrett and MP Sir Thomas Firbank. He went to Uppingham School, and then on to Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He converted to Catholicism in 1907...

. The collection also includes the unproduced screenplays Gun for the Devil (based upon an earlier short work of hers, collected in American Ghosts and Old World Wonders) and The Christchurch Murders (based on the Parker-Hulme murder

Parker-Hulme murder

The Parker-Hulme Murder was a murder and subsequent court case that occurred in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1954, achieving notoriety because a mother was murdered by two teenage girls: her daughter and her daughter's best friend...

s which also influenced the Peter Jackson

Peter Jackson

Sir Peter Robert Jackson, KNZM is a New Zealand film director, producer, actor, and screenwriter, known for his The Lord of the Rings film trilogy , adapted from the novel by J. R. R...

 film Heavenly Creatures

Heavenly Creatures

Heavenly Creatures is a 1994 film directed by Peter Jackson, from a screenplay he co-wrote with his wife Fran Walsh, about the notorious 1954 Parker-Hulme murder case in Christchurch, New Zealand. Filmed on location in Christchurch, it features Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet in their screen debuts...

), as well a stage adaptation of Frank Wedekind

Frank Wedekind

Benjamin Franklin Wedekind , usually known as Frank Wedekind, was a German playwright...

's Lulu plays. Carter's television work also included a controversial documentary entitled The Holy Family Album

The Holy Family Album

The Holy Family Album is a television documentary written and narrated by Angela Carter. It was directed by JoAnn Kaplan and produced by John Ellis at Large Door Productions, London, UK...

, which is not published here.

Edited and with production notes provided by Mark Bell, with an introduction by Susannah Clapp, the book was published by Chatto and Windus

Chatto and Windus

Chatto & Windus has been, since 1987, an imprint of Random House, publishers. It was originally an important publisher of books in London, founded in the Victorian era....

 in 1996

1996 in literature

The year 1996 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*Harper Lee's novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, is removed from an advanced placement English reading list in Lindale, Texas because it "conflicted with the values of the community."* In the United Kingdom, the first...

, four years after Angela Carter's death.