Лучшие книги Джуны Барнс

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 love of her life.

Nightwood, Djuna Barnes' strange and sinuous tour de force, "belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch" (TLS). 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. Barnes' depiction of these characters and their relationships (Nora says, "A man is another person—a 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." Recognised as a twentieth-century classic, the influence of Djuna Barnes's novel has been, and continues to be, exceptional.

Now with a new preface by Jeanette Winterson, Nightwood still crackles with the same electric charge it had on its first publication in 1936.

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.

"Now this be a Tale of as fine a Wench as ever wet Bed . . . Thus begins this Almanack, which all Ladies should carry about with them, 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!"

fiction, ed w/intro by Douglas Messerli

As a collection, these stories were published in 1982, but the stories within the volume were originally published 1914-1917.

The best of Djuna Barnes’s dark, droll, incisive short fiction, spanning her all-too-brief career, edited and introduced by Merve Emre.Djuna Barnes is rightly remembered for Nightwood, her breakthrough and final 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 Nightwood, 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. 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 New Yorker contributor Merve Emre. These are tales of women “‘tragique’ and ‘triste’ 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.”

When 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, and novelist Paul West has contributed a perceptive afterword.
"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—a bewildering hodge-podge of the obscene and the virginal, of satire and wistfulness, of the grossest humor and the most delicate sadness—a book that absolutely baffles classification, but that surely is a most amazing thing to have come from a woman's hand." (The Argonaut)
"A work of grim, mature beauty . . . she has caught life prismatically in a humor that, I dare say, no women, and few men, have succeeded in giving us." (Eugene Jolas, transition)
"Barnes dresses the page, as only she can do, in a remarkably flexible array of words, now Elizabethan, now Biblical in tone, shifting in genre from narrative to poetry to drama to parable. Her ability to control the exuberant interaction of these elements produces a text in which women's voices and that ever-so-tricky business of 'female experience' come to the fore fully on their own terms." (WLW Journal Winter 91)