Djuna Barnes Books In Order

Novels

  1. A Book (1923)
  2. Ryder (1928)
  3. Nightwood (1937)

Collections

  1. The Selected Works of Djuna Barnes (1962)
  2. Smoke (1982)
  3. The Collected Stories of Djuna Barnes (1998)
  4. The Lydia Steptoe Stories (2019)

Plays

  1. The Antiphon (1958)
  2. At the Root of the Stars (1995)

Non fiction

  1. Ladies Almanack (1928)
  2. New York (1928)
  3. Interviews (1985)
  4. I Could Never Be Lonely Without a Husband (1987)
  5. Poe’s Mother (1995)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Plays Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Djuna Barnes Books Overview

Ryder

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. ArgonautWhen it was first published in 1928, Djuna Barnes’s Ryder, a bawdy mock Elizabethan chronicle of a family very much like her own, was described in the Saturday Review as the most amazing book ever written by a woman. One of modern literature s first and best denunciations of patriarchal repression, Ryder employs an exuberant prose by which narrator Julie Ryder derides her hated father, polygamous Wendell Ryder. Barnes satirizes masculinity and domesticity by way of parable, poem, and play, and a prose style that echoes Chaucer, Shakespeare, the Bible, and Robert Burton s Anatomy of Melancholy. For this edition, several of Barnes s previously suppressed illustrations have been restored.

Nightwood

Admired by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Graham Greene, and Dylan Thomas, Djuna Barnes was the most influential and prolific female writer in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s. The Modern Library is proud to include for the first time her most critically acclaimed novel, Nightwood, which was praised by The Washington Post Book World as ‘a masterpiece of modernism.’ Dorothy Allison, author of the National Book Award nominated novel Bast*ard Out of Carolina, has written an Introduction especially for this edition, in which she defends Nightwood as a lesbian classic. First published in the United States in 1937, Nightwood is a novel of bold imagining and passionate, lyrical prose. Described by the author as the soliloquy of ‘a soul talking to itself in the heart of the night,’ the novel creates a dreamlike world in which time ceases to exist and in which human beings transform into animals. At Nightwood‘s center are the love affairs of Robin Vote a character based on Barnes’s lover, Thelma Wood. Robin marries Felix Volkbein, an eccentric aristocrat, whom she meets in Paris, and whom she abandons years later for the American Nora Flood. But Nora cannot contain Robin, either, and Robin in turn deserts her for the larcenous Jenny Petherbridge. Rich in irony and symbolism, Nightwood brilliantly depicts the all consuming power of erotic obsession in language that twists and turns, drawing the reader into a labyrinth of meaning and revelation. This edition also includes T. S. Eliot’s Introduction to the 1937 American edition. Elizabeth Hardwick wrote, ‘Djuna Barnes is 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.’

The Selected Works of Djuna Barnes

A selection of work by the American writer Djuna Barnes. It consists of her novel ‘Nightwood’, a collection of short stories entitled ‘Spillway’, and a verse play, ‘The Antiphon’, which she completed shortly before her death in 1982.

Smoke

fiction, ed w/intro by Douglas Messerli

The Antiphon

The important long play by Djuna Barnes.

At the Root of the Stars

16 plays, ed w/intro by Douglas Messerli

Ladies Almanack

‘Lesbianism, its flories and sorows, is the subject and quest of this marvelously erverse sentimental journey by Nightwood’s author…
A striking lesbian mainfesto and a deft parody.’ Library JournalBlending fiction, myth, and revisionary parody and accompanied by the author’s delightful illustrations, Ladies Almanac is also a brilliant modernist composition and arguably the most audacious lesbian text of its time. While the book pokes fun at the wealthy expatriates who were Barnes’ literary contemporaries and remains controversial today, it seems to have delighted its cast of characters, which was also the first audience. Barney herself subsidized its private publication in 1928. Fifty of the 1050 copies of the first edition were hand colored by the author, who was identified only as a lady of Fashion: on the title page.

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