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...

This modernist, experimental, and controversial novel examines gender politics in the lives of an American family.Lesbian poet, journalist, and illustrator Djuna Barnes's debut novel was a sensation when it was originally published in 1928. A bawdy parody of patriarchal repression, the book was heavily censored upon its release in America. An exploration of sexuality that is thought to be based on Barnes's own life, the novel depicts a family headed by polygamist W...

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'...

The stories brought together in this collection introduce the dazzling speculative imaginings of Djuna, one of South Korea's most provocative science-fiction writers. Whether describing how a species of interplanetary machines brings Korea's North-South divide into the heavens or satirizing the vampiric nature of Confucian patriarchy, these stories evoke a universe at once familiar and clearly fantastical. Blending influences ranging from genre fiction (zombie, vampire, science-fiction, yo...

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...

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...

"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...

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...

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 “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...

Djuna Barnes's A Book (1923) is a strikingly heterogeneous collection of poems, short fiction, plays, and drawings that announces the author's modernist fascination with fractured identities, erotic ambiguity, grotesque humor, and theatrical excess. Its style moves between fin-de-siècle decadence and avant-garde compression, blending lyric intensity with satirical sharpness. Positioned within the experimental ferment of early twentieth-century Anglo-American modernism, the volume anticipat...