This bestselling collection of stories extols the female virtues of discontent, sexual disruptiveness and bad manners.

Here are subversive tales – by Ama Ata Aidoo, Jane Bowles, Angela Carter, Colette, Bessie Head, Jamaica Kincaid and Katherine Mansfield among others – all have one thing in common: the wish to restore adventuresses and revolutionaries to their rightful position as models for all women

Reflecting the wide-ranging intelligence and deliciously anarchic taste of Angela Carter, some of these stories celebrate toughness and resilience, some of them low cunning: all of them are about not being nice.