This year marks the centennial of the birth of British-born Surrealist artist and writer Leonora Carrington. Alejandro Jodorowsky claims, in his memoir that she was also a powerful magician with strange and powerful practices largely of her own devising. Three of her books have been put back into print in celebration of her centennial and the New York Times Book Review has reviewed them all. They might be well approached as magical diaries at the very least. At best, as useful reading as Huysmans’ A Rebours and Rabelais’ Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel. An excerpt from the review states:
“This year marks the centennial of her birth, and three of her books have just been reissued: THE COMPLETE STORIES (Dorothy, paper, $16); DOWN BELOW (New York Review Books, paper, $14), a memoir of her months in a mental institution in Spain; and THE MILK OF DREAMS (New York Review Children’s Collection, $15.95), her fables for children. Carrington never stopped writing with both hands; she is always telling two stories at once. “Leonora told me that every piece of writing she ever did was autobiographical,” her biographer Joanna Moorhead recalled.”
