The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington

One of the most original, joyful, satisfying, and quietly visionary novels of the twentieth century.' -Ali Smith 'In The Hearing Trumpet, Carrington leans into her starkest eccentricities, depicting the subversive power of womanhood with more imaginative zeal than almost any other 20th century novelist.' -Brady Brickner-Wood, Ploughshares 'The Hearing Trumpet is so inspiring! Free-flowing, spiky imagination. It asks its readers to allow the dark, allow the wild and rethink how power works.

reads on its parodic surface like an Agatha Christie domestic mystery, but one melted, dissolved by extreme heat into something unthinkably other, and reconstructed as the casebook of an alchemist. In the novel, delusions of grandeur become real powers.' -Elisa Gabbert, The Paris Review Daily 'The Hearing Trumpet. Here the experience is transformed into something more fabulist, and much more interesting than the memoir. But it's not lightly fictionalized autobiography along the lines of The Bell Jar. mind-flaying masterpiece, held together by Carrington's gifts of wit, imagination and suspense.' -Blake Butler, The New York Times 'A version of Carrington's episode in the sanatorium also found its way into a novel, The Hearing Trumpet, written in the fifties or early sixties. 'ne of the great comic novels of the twentieth century, The Hearing Trumpet reads like a spectacular reassemblage of old and new genres, the campy, illegitimate offspring of Margaret Cavendish's romances and Robert Graves's histories, with Thomas Pynchon's riotous paranoia spliced in to keep it limber and receptive to the political anxieties of its moment.' -Merve Emre, The New Yorker 'Her 1974 novel, The Hearing Trumpet, newly reissued, stands out as something at last truly radical, undoing not only our expectations of time and space, but of the psyche and its boundaries.

The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington