The fiery and enigmatic masterpiece—one of the greatest novels of the Modernist era.Nightwood, Djuna Barnes' strange and sinuous tour de force, "belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch" (Times Literary Supplement). That time is the period between the two World Wars, and Barnes' novel unfolds in the decadent shadows of Europe's great cities, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna—a world in which the boundaries of class, rel...

Toward dusk, in the Summer of the year, a man dressed in a frock coat and top hat, and carrying a cane, crept through the underbrush bordering the corral of the Buckler farm. As he moved, small twigs snapped, fell and were silent. His knees were green from wounded shrubbery and grass, and his outspread hands tore unheeded plants. His wrists hurt him and he rested from time to time, always caring for his hat and knotted yellow cane, blowing through his moustache. Dew had been falling, cover...

“…all Ladies should carry about with them [this almanack], as the Priest his Breviary, as the Cook his Recipes, as the Doctor his Physic, as the Bride her Fears, and as the Lion his Roar!”Unquestionably unique in its execution of narrative, Djuna Barnes’ The Ladies Almanack is an experimental roman à clef that intertwines fiction, myth, and parody into one of the boldest pieces of lesbian literature published in the twentieth century.Priva...

"A Book" is a mix of short stories, poetry, plays, and illustrations, reflecting Barnes' experimental and eclectic approach to writing. The pieces vary in tone, from humorous and satirical to dark and introspective. The collection is often seen as a precursor to her later, more fully developed works, where themes of isolation, identity, and human relationships are more deeply explored.The writings in "A Book" display Barnes' unique voice—one that blends modernist experimentation with Gothi...

From the author of Nightwood, Djuna Barnes has written a book that is all that she was, and must still be vulgar, beautiful, defiant, witty, poetic, and a little mad.Told as through a kaleidoscope, the chronicle of the Ryder family is a bawdy tale of eccentricity and anarchy; through sparkling detours and pastiche, cult author Djuna Barnes spins an audacious, intricate story of sexuality, power, and praxis.Ryder, like its namesake, Wendell Ryder, is many t...

The best of Djuna Barnes’s dark, droll, incisive short fiction, spanning her all-too-pief career, edited and introduced by Merve Emre.Djuna Barnes is rightly remembered for Nightwood, her peakthrough and final novel: a hallmark of modernist literature, championed by T. S. Eliot, and one of the first, strangest, and most pilliant novels of love between women to be published in the twentieth century. Barnes’s career began long before Nightwood, howe...

A “striking lesbian manifesto and a deft parody” by the acclaimed author of Nightwood. **(—**Library Journal)Blending fiction, myth, and revisionary parody, Ladies Almanack is a brilliant modernist composition and arguably the most audacious lesbian text of its time. While the book pokes fun at the wealthy Paris expatriates who were Barnes' literary contemporaries and remains controversial today, it seems...

Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles.'I have quite changed my mind. I am going to run away and become a boy.'In these three stories, written by Djuna Barnes under the pseudonym Lydia Steptoe, three characters find themselves on the brink of a sexual awakening - accompanied by guns, whips, and worldly innuendo.A fourteen-year-old girl plans to become '...

A WIRED "BOOK YOU NEED TO READ" • For fans of the worlds of Philip K. Dick, Squid Game, and Severance: An absorbing tale of corporate intrigue, political unrest, unsolved mysteries, and the havoc wreaked by one company’s monomaniacal endeavor to build the world’s first space elevatorAn “antic, madcap noir with flair" (Wired) and“fast-paced cyberpunk story” (The New York Times Book Review) from one of South Korea'...

For as many reasons as there are days in a year... a century... or millennia, some novelists choose to write incognito. By using an alias, pen name; or, as the French so beautifully say, nom de plume, they'll cloak their true identities.The nom de plume, while convenient, does present a bit of a conundrum for the writer. Whose backstory or biography should an author employ introducing themselves to their reading public? Their own, or their literary double's. Enter the crea...

Poisoned cigars, seductive apparitions, minds and empires in the last of their decline and the most notorious kiss in dramatic history – decadent plays challenged the moral as much as the dramatic imagination of their own day, and continue to probe horizons of taste and the possibilities of stagecraft.In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many writers reacted to urban modernity by embracing decadent themes and styles, and dramatists were no exception. Decadenc...

Clarkesworld is a Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning science fiction and fantasy magazine. Each month we bring you a mix of fiction, articles, interviews and art. Our September 2023 issue (#204) contains:* Original fiction by Nnedi Okorafor ("Stones"), D.A. Xiaolin Spires ("The Queen of Calligraphic Susurrations"), Nika Murphy ("A Guide to Matchmaking on Station 9"), Arula Ratnakar ("Axiom of Dreams"), Djuna ("The People from the Dead Whale"), R. L. Meza ("The Five Remembrances, ...