The SKULL OF CHARLOTTE CORDAY — Leslie Dick

A brilliant and chilling collection of short stories that descends into the deeper recesses of the human mind and maps the bizarre and troubling byways of human history.Dark, witty, and entertaining, The Skull of Charlotte Corday: And Other Stories returns insistently to the innermost dilemmas of femininity, spinning strange tales of medical humiliation, sexual betrayal, perverse eroticism, and the unsettling traumas of child rearing.The title story, The Skull of Charlotte Corday, tells the true tale of the beautiful assassin, who, during the Great Terror, murdered the French revolutionary leader Jean Paul Marat in his bath. After her public execution, Corday's skull, a rich prize in the head-trading industry of the day, found its way into the hands of a descendant of Napoleon, Princess Marie Bonaparte, who was to become a pioneer psychoanalyst. Leslie Dick skillfully interweaves the astonishing stories of these two women, their melodramatic lives linked by a macabre trophy.From contemporary motherhood in Los Angeles to computer sex in Paris, these stories explore people, places, and emotions with an uncanny eye for detail and a sharp insight into the grand outrageousness of life.