The Stone Door - by Leonora Carrington (Paperback)

About the Book

The Stone Door is a surrealist allegory intertwining myth, mysticism, and romance. Written by Leonora Carrington after World War II, the novel follows a woman's symbolic journey through esoteric teachings, ancient lands, and dreamlike visions in pursuit of spiritual awakening and the unification of male and female forces. Both a metaphysical adventure and a tribute to Carrington's personal love story, it offers a visionary exploration of transformation and liberation--Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"[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

About the Author

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.

Gabriel Weisz Carrington is a poet, playwright, theatre researcher and comparative literature researcher. He collaborated with Leonora Carrington in a few creative endeavours; a joint project with the Dark Book, building sets for theatre, cinema and assisting Leonora with a few sculptures. He holds a doctorate in Comparative Literature and is a professor of Comparative Literature at Universidad Autónoma de México. He is the first-born son of Leonora.

Anna Watz is Associate Professor (Docent) of English Literature. She is the author of Angela Carter and Surrealism: 'A Feminist Libertarian Aesthetic' and editor of A History of the Surrealist Novel and Surrealist Women's Writing: A Critical Exploration. Her second monograph, Surrealism and Feminine Difference, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.