Product 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?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1170712 in Books
• Published on: 2004-06-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 48 pages

Amazon.com Review
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.

Review
"As an 'Almanack,' the book celebrates the uniqueness of women . . . extolling their society with separatist sentiment not violent or radical so much as mirthful and delightful." -- The Daily Helmsman 11-5-91

"[I]f you are able to contain your cackling long enough to consider the truth underlying the jest, you will come away with an understanding of the dilemmas facing lesbians at the opening of the century. You'll find that they are not much different from the questions we grapple with today." -- Lambda Book Report 12-91

About the Author
Although Djuna Barnes was a New Yorker who spent much of her long life in Greenwich Village, where she died a virtual recluse in 1982, she resided for extended periods of time in France and England. Her writings are representative modernist works in that they seem to transcend all national boundaries to take place in a land peculiarly her own. Deeply influenced by the French symbolists of the late nineteenth century and by the surrealists of the 1930s, she also wrote as a liberated woman, whose unconventional way of life is reflected in the uncompromising individuality of her literary style. Barnes's dreamlike and haunted writings have never found a wide popular audience, but they have strongly influenced such writers as Rebecca West, Nelson Algren, Dahlberg, Lowry, Miller, and especially Nin, in whose works a semifictional character named Djuna sometimes appears. In 1915 Barnes anonymously published The Book of Repulsive Women. Not long after she moved to Paris and became associated with the colony of writers and artists who made that city the international center of culture during the 1920s and early 1930s. Her Ladies Almanack was privately printed in Paris in 1928, the same year that Liveright in the United States published Ryder, her first novel. The book on which Barnes's fame largely rests is Nightwood (1936), a surrealistic story set in Paris and the United States, dealing with the complex relationships among a group of strangely obsessed characters, most of them homosexuals and lesbians. Barnes wrote little after Nightwood. In 1952, she professed to Malcolm Lowry that the experience of writing that searing work so frightened her that she was unable to write anything after it. Fortunately, her literary talents revived with The Antiphon, a verse-drama originally published in 1958, which is now available in Selected Works (1962).

Customer Reviews

An extraordinary book. Great fun reading and rereading it.
This is a funny book written in a poetry like style.The amusing illustrations are inspired on old wood engravings.But it's not only the story an the illustrations that are interesting. The book itself, the way it was published and distributed is also verry interesting and even romantic.In 1928 'spicy' books weren't allowed, not even in Paris France. So it was privately published in a small edition of which about 50 copies were hand coloured by the author. All books were sold by Djuna Barnes and some frends in secret along the Seine.With the help of Natalie Barneys copie the 1972 edition contains an explanation of the names used in the story and who they were in real life.

Fine storytelling
Djuna Barnes (June 12, 1892 - June 18, 1982) played an important part in the development of 20th century English language modernist writing by women and was one of the key figures in 1920s and 30s bohemian Paris.

Her novel Nightwood became a cult work of modern fiction, helped by an introduction written by T.S. Eliot, and stands out for for its portrayal of lesbian themes and distinctive style.

Barnes spent the last 40 years of her life as a recluse in New York city. Since her death, interest in her work has grown and many of her books, like this one, are now back in print.

Her books are lively, irreverent, and just plain fun to read in modern times. I highly recommend that you introduce yourself to this original author!