Search results for ""Author Djuna Barnes""

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 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.A vanguard modernist, Djuna Barnes has been called the patron literary saint of Bohemia, and her second novel, Ryder, 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 Ulysses 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.

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Esta es la Historia de la Moza más hermosa y delicada que jamás humedeció una Cama. Se llamaba Evangeline Musset y había sido condecorada con una Enorme Cruz Roja por la Dedicación, el Alivio y la Distracción que proporcionaba a las Muchachas en sus Partes Posteriores, en las Anteriores y en cualquiera de esas Partes que tan Cruelmente las hace sufrir.Escrito a modo de calendario medieval, ?El almanaque de las mujeres? es una astuta parodia en torno al alocado círculo sáfico de Natalie Barney y su Académie des Femmes. Agudo, mordaz, ingenioso y trasgresor, es también un texto moderno y precursor en su visión del lesbianismo y las cuestiones que envuelven las relaciones entre mujeres. La endogamia afectiva, el travestismo, la maternidad, el matrimonio o las diferencias entre sexo y género están ya planteadas en ?El Almanaque? con una carga de ironía y acidez poco frecuentes en el tratamiento del tema. Y es además un soplo de aire fresco, un referente imprescindible para conocer el mu

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Lose yourself in the tortured love lives of expats in 1920s Paris in this iconic cult classic.'Nightwood 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'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'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 HustvedtNightwood 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.'A bold, exceptionally well-written modernist prose poem ... The closest thing to James Joyce.' Andre Aciman'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'One of the greatest books of the twentieth century.' William S. Burroughs'A writer of wild and original gifts . To her name there is always to be attached the splendor of Nightwood, a lasting achievement of her great gifts and eccentricities - her passionate prose and, in this case, a genuineness of human passions.' Elizabeth Hardwick

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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. This selection 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 and uncollected poems, and five illustrations by Barnes herself. Rebecca Loncraine provides an introduction to Barnes' poetry.

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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 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.'Barnes makes gender and desire seem slippery and joyful - and makes the fictional Lydia Steptoe seem like a writer for our time.Bringing together past, present and future in our ninetieth year, Faber Stories is a celebratory compendium of collectable work.

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Lose yourself in the tortured love lives of expats in 1920s Paris in this iconic cult classic.'Nightwood 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'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'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 HustvedtNightwood 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.'A bold, exceptionally well-written modernist prose poem ... The closest thing to James Joyce.' Andre Aciman'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'One of the greatest books of the twentieth century.' William S. Burroughs'A writer of wild and original gifts . To her name there is always to be attached the splendor of Nightwood, a lasting achievement of her great gifts and eccentricities - her passionate prose and, in this case, a genuineness of human passions.' Elizabeth Hardwick

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