Rick Moody (right) selected this month's book

In an attempt to prove that musicians aren't just interested in sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, SPIN.com has gathered together an eclectic group of literary-minded musicians and authors to participate in a monthly, online book club. One member selects a book that has impacted their life for the club to read and subsequently discuss. We post the highlights.

This Month's Selection: The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

Selected by: Rick Moody, author and honorary book club member

Reason for Selection: "I first read The Bloody Chamber back in college, when I was lucky enough to be in Angela's class. I didn't really know much about her then, and she was a lot better known in England than the U.S. at that time. But this was the book that kind of put her on the map. It consists of 'adult' versions of classic fairy tales from Perrault and others, but they aren't 'adult' in a reductive, crass way. They just sort of pry apart Little Red Riding Hood (above all) and give it (and the other classic tales) a much more nuanced and knowing surface.

"The first day of class with her, back in Providence, kind of provides a context. The class was over-enrolled, and Angela had to get it down to fourteen. When some guy in the back of the room asked what her work was like, Angela answered: 'My work cuts like a steel blade at the base of a man's penis.' The class was soon winnowed down to the necessary fourteen students. So these are stories that have that kind of comic sensibility. Fairy tales written by the kind of person who would say that sort of thing to a bunch of college students.

"The best story here, from my recollection, is 'The Company of Wolves,' but there's really not a bad one in here, and they are all animated by a certain acerbic language that just accepts no bullshit. She died of lung cancer in the nineties (too young: only in her fifties), but I remember her not only as a great teacher and person, but also for the perfection of the sentences and for her point of view. She was part witch, part socialist-realist, part Swinging London moll."

The discussion:

Emily Zemler, SPIN.com
I'm generally pretty thrilled by any writer who compares their work to the act of castration, but I am particularly engaged by one like Angela Carter whose sense of feminism is not easily categorized and often seems to lurk beneath the surface of her stories. Her writing seems especially successful because the prose is so well wrought, allowing overarching and interwoven ideas to pervade the stories naturally, without a feeling of the force that often intrudes upon so-called feminist literature.

I read these out of order, which I'm not certain you are supposed to do, but I will admit that I wanted to go straight for the wolf stories. I read a book a year or so ago called Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked by Catherine Orenstein, which traces the themes and morality of that fairy tale through literary history and spends a great deal of time discussing it as a feminist work. Carter is discussed, briefly, unfortunately with the real emphasis on Neil Jordan's cinematic remake of Carter's stories In the Company of Wolves. There have been so many retellings of this specific fairy tale and its symbolism and meaning have been interpreted so many different ways (i.e. the bread in Red's basket represents the communion of Christ; the red cloak represents menstrual blood; it is a classic Freudian tale of the Ego versus the Id; etc) and I was intrigued by Carter's version(s).

Feminism is a term that is frequently misinterpreted. It has meant different things at different times throughout history. This book was published in 1979 near the end of Second Wave feminism, a train of thought that was more about dealing with social issues of gender inequality than with legal and political issues. That is to say, it was more about changing the public consciousness about the way women were perceived. Reading these stories in today's supposedly post-feminist world I wasn't necessarily blown away by their subjugation of the male-female dynamic, but perhaps the point is that they are more powerful because they are more subtle in addressing that public consciousness. Carter's ideas about how women should be portrayed in fairy tales don't come from the expected places in the stories- and I think that is what I liked most about them.

I insisted that Rick select a female author (really, how has no one picked one yet?) and I'm curious how the members of this book club, particularly the male ones, have reacted to his choice.

More discussion highlights on page 2.