Opus Siniestrus: Selected Plays
Mar 2026 · New York Review of Books
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About this ebook
Ghosts, a toy horse, an ostrich egg, and a menagerie of apocalyptic and chimerical beasts feature in these characteristically playful, never-before-collected plays by the legendary surrealist writer and artist Leonora Carrington.
Best known for her vivid, dreamlike paintings and darkly humorous prose, Leonora Carrington was also a brilliant playwright whose dramatic works are as subversive and sly as anything we have come to expect of her. The first comprehensive collection of Carrington’s plays, this volume gathers plays from her early years in Paris to her later work in Mexico City, and includes several that have never before been translated from French and Spanish.
A young woman falls in love with her rocking horse in the coming-of-age-tale Penelope—a production of which was famously staged in 1961 by Alejandro Jodorowsky. In Flannel Night Shirt, a corpse lies in a pool of blood while ghostly figures in flannel night shirts frolic in the basement. And in the ecofeminist satire Opus Siniestrus, an old woman—the sole survivor of a virus that kills only women—battles the patriarchy to prevent it from claiming the last ostrich egg in the world.
Reminiscent of the films of Maya Deren and David Lynch, these are stories of repressed desires and forbidden pleasures, of myths and mysticism, magic and mayhem, from one of the most singular and imaginative minds of the twentieth century.
Best known for her vivid, dreamlike paintings and darkly humorous prose, Leonora Carrington was also a brilliant playwright whose dramatic works are as subversive and sly as anything we have come to expect of her. The first comprehensive collection of Carrington’s plays, this volume gathers plays from her early years in Paris to her later work in Mexico City, and includes several that have never before been translated from French and Spanish.
A young woman falls in love with her rocking horse in the coming-of-age-tale Penelope—a production of which was famously staged in 1961 by Alejandro Jodorowsky. In Flannel Night Shirt, a corpse lies in a pool of blood while ghostly figures in flannel night shirts frolic in the basement. And in the ecofeminist satire Opus Siniestrus, an old woman—the sole survivor of a virus that kills only women—battles the patriarchy to prevent it from claiming the last ostrich egg in the world.
Reminiscent of the films of Maya Deren and David Lynch, these are stories of repressed desires and forbidden pleasures, of myths and mysticism, magic and mayhem, from one of the most singular and imaginative minds of the twentieth century.
About the author
Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) was a Surrealist painter and writer. Born in Lancashire, England, she spent most of her life in Mexico City among artists such as Remedios Varo and Alejandro Jodorowsky. Her writings include the novel The Hearing Trumpet, the memoir Down Below, and a collection of illustrated stories for children, The Milk of Dreams, all available from NYRB.
Jonathan P. Eburne is the author of Exploded Views: Speculative Form and the Labor of Inquiry, Outsider Theory: Intellectual Histories of Unorthodox Ideas, and Surrealism and the Art of Crime. He has also edited or co-edited several books, including The Cambridge History of Surrealist Poetry and Leonora Carrington and the International Avant-Garde. He is the J. H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities at Washington University.
Jonathan P. Eburne is the author of Exploded Views: Speculative Form and the Labor of Inquiry, Outsider Theory: Intellectual Histories of Unorthodox Ideas, and Surrealism and the Art of Crime. He has also edited or co-edited several books, including The Cambridge History of Surrealist Poetry and Leonora Carrington and the International Avant-Garde. He is the J. H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities at Washington University.
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