|
|
Barnes Djuna
Nightwood (New Edition)
List Price:
$13.95
Price: $7.19
You Save: $6.76 (48%)
Description
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, religion, and sexuality are bold but surprisingly porous. The outsized characters who inhabit this world are some of the most memorable in all of fiction—there is Guido Volkbein, the Wandering Jew and son of a self-proclaimed baron; Robin Vote, the American expatriate who marries him and then engages in a series of affairs, first with Nora Flood and then with Jenny Petherbridge, driving all of her lovers to distraction with her passion for wandering alone in the night; and there is Dr. Matthew-Mighty-Grain-of-Salt-Dante-O'Connor, a transvestite and ostensible gynecologist, whose digressive speeches brim with fury, keen insights, and surprising allusions. Barnes' depiction of these characters and their relationships (Nora says, "A man is another persona woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic; on her mouth you kiss your own") has made the novel a landmark of feminist and lesbian literature. Most striking of all is Barnes' unparalleled stylistic innovation, which led T. S. Eliot to proclaim the book "so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it." Now with a new preface by Jeanette Winterson, Nightwood still crackles with the same electric charge it had on its first publication in 1936.
Nightwood is not only a classic of lesbian literature, but was also acknowledged by no less than T. S. Eliot as one of the great novels of the 20th century. Eliot admired Djuna Barnes' rich, evocative language. Lesbian readers will admire the exquisite craftsmanship and Barnes' penetrating insights into obsessive passion. Barnes told a friend that Nightwood was written with her own blood "while it was still running." That flowing wound was the breakup of an eight-year relationship with the lesbian love of her life.
The Book of Repulsive Women: And Other Poems
List Price:
$19.95
Price: $19.95
Description
Published together for the first time, this collection features work from 1914 to the 1970s—many pieces first appearing in pamphlets and literary journals in New York and Paris—including illustrations by the author.
The Ladies Almanack
List Price:
$30.95
Price: $20.43
You Save: $10.52 (34%)
Description
Oh Zeus! Oh Diane! Oh Hellebore! Oh Absalom! Oh Piscary Right! What shall I do with it! To have been the First , that alone would have gifted me! As it is, shall I not pour ashes upon my Head, gird me in Sackcloth, covering my Nothing and Despair under a Mountain of Cinders, and thus become a Monument to No-Ability for her sake?
Djuna Barnes must have had great fun writing and illustrating this book. It's a lively lampoon of her lesbian chums of Left Bank Paris in the 1920s. The main character, Dame Evangeline Musset, is based on the notorious dyke Natalie Barney. Structured as a month-by-month almanac in a style that owes as much to Shakespeare's comedies as to any literature of the intervening centuries, Barnes's book follows the Dame's amorous, often naughty, adventures.
New York
Description
Published in newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1931, these pieces conjure up a magical, mythical city as Djuna Barnes is rescued by firemen, tangoed across the floor of local dancehalls, lectured to by suffragists and force-fed by the police. A reporter of "real" life, she goes in search of Chinatown, takes a boat trip round Manhattan Island, pursues a stone-cutter in the Bronx, and breakfasts in Bohemia with women who smoke a hundred cigarettes a day and spill their wine. From Brooklyn's Walkabout Market to the Hippodrome Circus, from a Long Island Boxing Club to the Italian theatre in the Bowery, from the beach of Coney Island to Greenwich Village with its "recollections like ears filled with muted music", we are introduced to a New York of energy and eccentricity, a place where anything can happen and anything goes. The illustrations are by the author herself.
Collected Poems: With Notes Toward the Memoirs
List Price:
$24.95
Price: $24.92
You Save: $0.03 (%)
Description
This groundbreaking edition compiles many of the late unpublished works of American writer Djuna Barnes (1892–1982). Because she published only seven poems and a play during the last forty years of her life, scholars believed Barnes wrote almost nothing during this period. But at the time of her death her apartment was filled with multiple drafts of unpublished poetry and notes toward her memoirs, both included here for the first time. Best known for her tragic lesbian novel Nightwood, Barnes has always been considered a crucial modernist. Her later poetry will only enhance this reputation as it shows her remarkable evolution from a competent young writer to a deeply intellectual poet in the metaphysical tradition. With the full force of her biting wit and dramatic flair, Barnes’s autobiographical notes describe the expatriate scene in Paris during the 1920s, including her interactions with James Joyce and Gertrude Stein and her intimate recollections of T. S. Eliot. These memoirs provide a rare opportunity to experience the intense personality of this complex and fascinating poet.
Collected Stories (Sun & Moon Classics)
List Price:
$24.95
Price: $82.88
Description
Beginning in 1914, Djuna Barnes contributed regularly to numerous magazines and newspapers works of fiction, poetry, essay, and drama. Unlike some works in other genres in which she wrote, Barnes held her stories in particularly high regard, revising several of the stories collected in A Book (1923; reprinted as A Night Among the Horses in 1929) late in her life. These stories from Spillway, her other early tales, and other stories never before published are collected in this volume. What they reveal is the breadth and consistency of Barnes's story writing, and should help establish her as one of the most interesting and vital storytellers of the great period of American literary output after World War I. Barnes is recognized internationally for her masterwork Nightwood and for other works of fiction, including Ryder and Ladies Almanack. She also wrote plays, most notably The Antiphon-which will be republished by Sun & Moon Press next year-and shorter works collected in At the Roots of the Stars: The Short Plays. Her early poetic work, The Book of Repulsive Women, has increasingly gainer readers over the past few years. A selection of her drawings, which often accompanied her literary writing, has just been published by Sun & Moon Press as Poe's Mother.
Djuna Barnes, best known for her 1936 novel Nightwood, was a modernist with a fertile talent, who worked as an illustrator, a reporter, and a feature writer for newspapers and avant-garde magazines in the first half of this century. In their playfulness with words and syntax, the short stories in this volume, written between 1914 and 1942 and collected by her biographer, Phillip Herring, show the influence of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. Many were written for magazines and end with a plot twist. As one might expect from a visual artist, these stories are full of symbolic images, often hauntingly grotesque.
Barnes Djuna News
A new take on the Paris of the '20s
Waynesville Smoky Mountain News - Jun 23, 2011
A new take on the Paris of the '20s the wine and spirits flowed legally and copiously while America underwent its experiment with Prohibition, writers like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Djuna Barnes, and the young and unknown Thomas Wolfe all came to Paris in that decade.
|
Woody Rediscovers Woody in Paris
Huffington Post (blog) - Jun 21, 2011
Soon thereafter, he proceeds to have encounters with an all-star roster of his modernist role models and their cultural contemporaries: Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Picasso, TS Eliot, Dali, Buňuel, Man Ray, Josephine Baker, Djuna Barnes, Cole Porter, and more »
|
Andy Bockelman: A bon mot on behalf of 'Midnight in Paris'
Craig Daily Press - Jun 27, 2011
Andy Bockelman: A bon mot on behalf of 'Midnight in Paris'Perhaps the wit of Djuna Barnes dancing the Charleston with our protagonist may be too esoteric a reference for some people, but if they're laughing, that's all that matters. Requires free craigdailypress.com registration. Register or log in below.
|
Midnight in Paris + Brasserie by Niche
Riverfront Times (blog) - Jun 16, 2011
There's Djuna Barnes, dancing the Charleston! Really, the film is telling us to reject nostalgia even while it's swimming it. Only a Woody Allen film could argue for choosing to live in the present -- even while its hero expresses that choice by moving and more »
|
Interview with Zadie Smith
The Literateur - Jun 24, 2011
Nor was Djuna Barnes. They were intending to be truthful to their own conceptions of the world, and it happened that their truths were rigorous, painful and difficult. Then again, if anyone were to write with complete honesty about their experience of
|
|
-
-
-
More authors
-
Authors A to Z
|