The Stone Door

Ancient Mesopotamia, the Zodiac, and the land of the dead feature in this wildly surrealistic adventure story—Leonora Carrington’s revolutionary second novel, long out of print.

The Stone Door is an omen, an incantation, and an adventure story rolled into one. Built in layers like a puzzle box, it is the tale of two people, of love and the Zodiac and the Kabbalah, of Transylvania and Mesopotamia converging at the Caucasus, of a mad Hungarian King named Böles Kilary and of a woman’s discovery of an initiatory code that leads to a Cyclopean obstacle, to love, self and awareness, to the great stone door of Kescke and beyond.

Written at the end of World War II but not published until 1977 and long unavailable, The Stone Door is at once a celebration of the union of Carrington and her husband, the Hungarian-born photographer Chiki Weisz, and an argument for the unification of the male and the female as a means of liberating the human race.

Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) was born in Lancashire, England, to an industrialist father and an Irish mother. She was raised on fantastical folktales told to her by her Irish nanny at her family’s estate, Crookhey Hall. A renowned artist as well as a writer, she lived a majority of her life in Mexico City, moving in a circle of like-minded artists that included Remedios Varo and Alejandro Jodorowsky. Her surrealistic paintings and sculptures have been hosted in galleries and museums all over the world. A novel, The Hearing Trumpet; a memoir of madness, Down Below; and an illustrated group of stories for children, The Milk of Dreams, are all available from New York Review Books.