{"title":"Books by Djuna Barnes","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780571235285","title":"Nightwood","description":"\u003cp\u003eLose yourself in the tortured love lives of expats in 1920s Paris in this iconic cult classic.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'\u003ci\u003eNightwood\u003c\/i\u003e is itself. It is its own created world, exotic and strange, and reading it is like drinking wine with a pearl dissolving in the glass ... From now on, a part of you is pearl-lined.' Jeanette Winterson\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'Like a dark lesbian genius rolling in a giant heap of damp, dead leaves. What a great, shaking, grieving party this book is — the best.' Eileen Myles\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'I read with the aching intensity of a person possessed ... The story of passion and grief, of exile and loneliness, spoke directly to me, a young woman who [never] felt she quite belonged ... A hymn to the dispossessed, the misbegotten and those who love too much.' Siri Hustvedt\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNightwood\u003c\/i\u003e tells the stories of the love-lives of a group of American expats and Europeans in Paris in the 1920s - an exotic, night-time underworld, eccentric, seedy and beautiful. A modernist masterpiece, and one of the earliest novels to explicitly portray homosexuality, the influence of Djuna Barnes's novel remains exceptional.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'A bold, exceptionally well-written modernist prose poem ... The closest thing to James Joyce.' Andre Aciman\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'The great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterisation, and a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy.' T.S. Eliot\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'One of the greatest books of the twentieth century.' William S. Burroughs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'A writer of wild and original gifts … To her name there is always to be attached the splendor of \u003ci\u003eNightwood\u003c\/i\u003e, a lasting achievement of her great gifts and eccentricities — her passionate prose and, in this case, a genuineness of human passions.' Elizabeth Hardwick\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43399609122994,"sku":"9780571235285","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780571235285_649cc4f6-6fc7-4c2d-8755-8432d06f6566.jpg?v=1786013851"},{"product_id":"9780571352470","title":"The Lydia Steptoe Stories","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eFaber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e‘I have quite changed my mind. I am going to run away and become a boy.’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA fourteen-year-old girl plans to become ‘a virago’, until her mother intercepts her first tryst by dressing up as her male lover. A boy of the same age is lured into the forest by his father’s mistress. A woman of forty falls in love and longs to kill herself, so unbearable is the return of the youth she thought she wanted. ‘Alice’, she tells herself, ‘be a man.’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBarnes makes gender and desire seem slippery and joyful – and makes the fictional Lydia Steptoe seem like a writer for our time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eBringing together past, present and future in our ninetieth year, Faber Stories is a celebratory compendium of collectable work.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56292780966261,"sku":"9780571352470","price":6.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780571352470_8772b9c5-886a-4eff-b9f9-e3f77302213f.jpg?v=1786014629"},{"product_id":"9781628974980","title":"Ryder","description":"From the author of \u003ci\u003eNightwood,\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003cp\u003eTold 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eRyder\u003c\/i\u003e, like its namesake, Wendell Ryder, is many things-lyric, prose, fable, illustration; protagonist, bastard, bohemian, polygamist. Born in the 1800s to infamous nonconformist Sophia Grieve Ryder, Wendell's search for identity takes him from Connecticut to England to multifarious digressions on morality, tradition, and gender. Censored upon its first release in 1928, Ryder’s portrayal of sexuality remains revolutionary despite the passing of time and the expurgations in the text, preserved by Barnes in protest of the war \"blindly raged against the written word.\" The weight of Wendell’s story endures despite this censorship, as his drive to assume the masculine roles of patriarch and protector comes at the sacrifice of the women around him.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA vanguard modernist, Djuna Barnes has been called the patron literary saint of Bohemia, and her second novel, \u003ci\u003eRyder\u003c\/i\u003e, evinces her cutting wit and originality. The nonlinear structure and polyphonic narration pull the reader into Barnes’ harlequin world like a riptide, echoing the melodic cascade of James Joyce’s \u003ci\u003eUlysses\u003c\/i\u003e and the avant-garde feminism of Dorothy Richardson. The novel is a rhapsodic saga that could have come only from Barnes’ pen—and politics—as impactful today upon at its first pressing, a document of sexual revolution and censorship.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56301769359733,"sku":"9781628974980","price":13.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781628974980_f12c1e9b-4c2d-4f6c-b793-68491d15ad41.jpg?v=1786023630"},{"product_id":"9781857547078","title":"The Book of Repulsive Women \u0026 Other Poems","description":"Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) once described herself as the most famous unknown writer, and although her novel, Nightwood is celebrated, her poetry has been a well-kept secret until now. This selection, the only one currently available, contains work written between 1914 and the 1970s. Many of the poems in The Book of Repulsive Women first appeared in pamphlets and literary journals in New York and Paris. Published together for the first time, they throw new light on Barnes' development as a writer. The book reveals her as a poet of unique power, at once compelling and disorientating. Marianne Moore observed, \"reading Djuna Barnes is like reading a foreign language, which you understand\".                  The Book of Repulsive Women includes previously unpublished poems, and five illustrations by Barnes herself. Rebecca Loncraine provides an essential introduction to Barnes' poetry.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56308743569781,"sku":"9781857547078","price":9.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781857547078_768e9da4-b8f1-448f-81af-036bfb389f82.jpg?v=1786034433"},{"product_id":"9781961341227","title":"I Am Alien to Life","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe best of Djuna Barnes’s dark, droll, incisive short fiction, spanning her all-too-brief career, edited and introduced by Merve Emre.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDjuna Barnes is rightly remembered for \u003ci\u003eNightwood\u003c\/i\u003e, her breakthrough and final novel: a hallmark of modernist literature, championed by T. S. Eliot, and one of the first, strangest, and most brilliant novels of love between women to be published in the twentieth century. Barnes’s career began long before \u003ci\u003eNightwood\u003c\/i\u003e, however, with journalism, essays, drama, and satire of extraordinary wit and courage. Long into her later life, after World War II, when she published nothing more, it was her short fiction above all that she prized and would continue to revise.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Here are all the stories Barnes sought to preserve, in the versions she preferred, as well as a smattering of rarities as selected by critic and \u003ci\u003eNew Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e contributor Merve Emre. These are tales of women “‘\u003ci\u003etragique\u003c\/i\u003e’ and ‘\u003ci\u003etriste\u003c\/i\u003e’ and ‘tremendous’ all at once,” of sons and daughters being initiated into the ugly comedy of life, monuments all to a worldview singular and scathing. As Emre writes in her foreword, “[Barnes’s] themes are love and death, especially in Paris and New York; the corruption of nature by culture; the tainted innocence of children; and the mute misery of beasts . . . her characters may be alien to life, but they are alive—spectacularly, grotesquely alive.”","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56309237645685,"sku":"9781961341227","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781961341227_6764ae42-5fcf-4b4c-86fb-465140bb81df.jpg?v=1786030387"},{"product_id":"9798986610993","title":"A Book","description":"\u003cp\u003eMuch of \u003cem\u003eA Book\u003c\/em\u003e is adapted from writing that appeared in the earliest years of Barnes' career, during the 1910s and early 1920s . . .Of the twenty-six pieces of writing between its covers - twelve stories, eleven poems, and three plays - at least nine had appeared in print beforehand, in modernist \"little magazines\" like \u003cem\u003eThe Little Review\u003c\/em\u003e, or in one of the several news publications that Barnes wrote for in New York. She republished \u003cem\u003eA Book\u003c\/em\u003e twice after its first appearance, though under different titles, as \u003cem\u003eA Night Among the Horses\u003c\/em\u003e (1929) and \u003cem\u003eSpillway\u003c\/em\u003e (1962), revising, retitling, and cutting along the way. . .\u003cem\u003eA Book\u003c\/em\u003e's short stories and plays, which range from a few pages in length to no more than seventeen, often feature few characters, are heavy with dialogue, and exploit this structure to portray stilted, often viciously exploitative, economies of human difference. Among her common themes are: divides of class and status and the space between urban and rural sensibilities (\"A Night Among the Horses,\" \"Three from the Earth,\" \"The Valet\"); the differences of sexuality and gendered embodiment (\"To the Dogs,\" \"No-Man's-Mare,\" \"The Dove\"); the relationships of always-precocious children to their guardians and older generations (\"Oscar,\" \"A Boy Asks a Question of a Lady\"); and the \"performance\" of national and racial belonging (\"The Rabbit,\" \"Katrina Silverstaff\").\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e- from the Introduction\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56310959210869,"sku":"9798986610993","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9798986610993_4f4c829b-865e-463a-9700-099fac8758d6.jpg?v=1786033222"},{"product_id":"9781628975581","title":"Ladies Almanack","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA \"striking lesbian manifesto and a deft parody\" by the acclaimed author of \u003ci\u003eNightwood. \u003c\/i\u003e(-\u003ci\u003eLibrary Journal)\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNearly 100 years after its original 1928 publication sent shockwaves through the literary scene, \u003ci\u003eLadies Almanack \u003c\/i\u003ereigns as a brilliant modernist composition and one of the most audacious lesbian texts of the 20th century. At once a scathing social satire and a love letter to the wealthy expatriates of Paris high society, the book delights in its cast of characters, who are clear analogues to Barnes' lesbian literary contemporaries—and the book’s first readers.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eArranged by month and written in a pastiche of Restoration literature, \u003ci\u003eLadies Almanack\u003c\/i\u003e records the life and lovers of Dame Evangeline Musset, a pseudonymous stand-in for Natalie Clifford Barney. Accompanied for the first time by Barnes’ original Elizabethan-style woodcut illustrations, this new edition also features a sharp, impassioned introduction by Sarah Schulman reflecting on the ways in which lesbian lives have changed—and haven’t—since the 1920s. After decades out of print, Dalkey Archive is proud to revive the \u003ci\u003eLadies Almanack\u003c\/i\u003e for contemporary readers: a classic that delivers all the salacious drama of \u003ci\u003eThe L Word \u003c\/i\u003ewith the literary wit and wordplay of Shakespeare.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56369051238773,"sku":"9781628975581","price":14.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781628975581_7a6767c0-a40d-4434-9182-6fc6efbef8cd.jpg?v=1786023641"},{"product_id":"nightwood","title":"Nightwood","description":null,"brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57613173948789,"sku":"9780571407194","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}]}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-djuna-barnes.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}