Shaking A Leg

Welcome to Shaking a Leg (1997) by Angela Carter (Penguin Books), ISBN 9780140276954 — a collection of journalism and essays that turns up looking like a perfectly normal paperback and then immediately starts doing what Angela Carter always does: making you feel smarter, slightly scandalised, and oddly delighted that someone is finally saying the sharp bit out loud.

This is Carter outside the fairy-tale machinery of her fiction, but still very much Carter: witty, ferocious, playful, politically alert, and allergic to lazy thinking. Shaking a Leg gathers her pieces on culture, politics, books, film, feminism, and the everyday strangeness of modern life — written with that distinctive voice that can be elegant and punchy at the same time. She has a gift for taking something that seems “normal” and showing you the wires, the theatre, the assumptions, the power games. Then she laughs. Then she cuts.

The title is perfect. “Shaking a leg” is what you tell someone when you want them to move, get on with it, stop dithering. Carter’s essays do the same to the reader. They hustle you along, nudge you awake, and refuse to let you sit comfortably inside received wisdom. There’s an irony in reading a 1997 collection that still feels briskly contemporary: you’ll recognise the debates, the absurdities, the cultural posturing — just with different hairstyles and fewer smartphones. Carter doesn’t date easily because she’s writing about the underlying machinery: who gets to speak, who gets mythologised, who gets dismissed, and what stories society tells itself to keep the furniture arranged.

And she’s fun. This isn’t “earnest essay writing” that tastes like medicine. Carter can be mischievous, gleefully exact, and wonderfully impatient with pomposity. She’ll give you cultural criticism with a novelist’s eye — sharp detail, vivid character sketches, and an instinct for the revealing quote. Even when she’s serious (often), there’s a sparkle of intelligence that makes the seriousness feel energising rather than heavy.

Condition: Good, meaning it’s been read and handled — which makes sense. This is a book people pick up, dip into, underline, lend, argue with. It might show a bit of wear, but it’s still fully ready to do its job: keep you entertained while it quietly rearranges your worldview.

Perfect for:

• Angela Carter fans who want more of her mind on the page,

• readers who like cultural criticism with teeth and humour,

• anyone interested in feminism, media, and myth-making,

• and people who enjoy essays that don’t just analyse the world — they prod it.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, naturally — because where else would a Penguin paperback of Carter’s sharpest non-fiction end up, if not waiting patiently to give the next reader a brisk intellectual shove and a grin that says: Come on. Keep up.

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