The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

Angela Carter was born in Eastbourne in 1940 and later evacuated to live with her grandmother in Yorkshire. She studied English at Bristol University and published the first of her nine novels, Shadow Dance, in 1966. After escaping an early marriage, she used the proceeds of a Somerset Maugham Award to enable her to live in Japan for two years, a transforming experience. Her final novel, Wise Children, was published in 1991, a year before her death from lung cancer at the age of fifty-one. In an obituary from the Observer, Margaret Atwood wrote that ‘She was the opposite of parochial … She relished life and language hugely, and revelled in the universe.’

Perhaps best known for her last two novels, Nights at the Circus and Wise Children, Carter was much admired for her work’s exuberant mix of fantasy, philosophy, science fiction and satire. The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman, published in 1972, is, according to Ali Smith, ‘her real, still underrated, classic’.

Both The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault and Heroes and Villains are also published in Penguin Modern Classics

Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. She is the author of Free Love, Like, Hotel World, Other Stories and Other Stories, The Whole Story and Other Stories, The Accidental, Girl Meets Boy and The First Person and Other Stories.