Product Description

first paperback edition of Barnes' stories

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2194142 in Books
• Published on: 2000-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Amazon.com Review
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.

From Publishers Weekly
A cult writer whose melodramatically unhappy life brought her into the Left Bank orbit of expatriate authors ranging from James Joyce to Gertrude Stein, Barnes employed an elliptical, sometimes surrealistic style as an elaborate screen for the autobiographical sources and raw pain that lie behind much of her work. Unfortunately, many of the 41 tales collected here?her entire short-story output? highlight her weaknesses as a writer rather than her strengths. Barnes was not a particularly adept shaper of plot, and often the deeper roots of her characters' grief and erratic behavior are too obscure to discern. In many of her stories, such as "The Rabbit," characters exhibit an intensity of feeling that seems to go way beyond the story's initial context, making them appear merely pathological. While her best tales?"A Night Among the Horses," "Oscar," "The Doctors," "Saturnalia" and, most prominently, "Spillway"?are fit company for her classic novel Nightwood, most of the fiction here will be of interest chiefly to scholars.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
Barnes biographer Philip Herring introduces this comprehensive collection--every tale known to have been written by Barnes--which will be of great interest to scholars and devotees. Others, however, might be confused by the inadequately annotated gathering, since the 41 stories are not dated, nor are the original places of publication noted. Most of the early fiction (written for weekly magazines) is identifiable by its melodramatic naturalism: slangy stories of urban romance that emphasize class distinctions and the harsher realities of city life, featuring bohemians in Greenwich Village, dance-hall girls, and immigrant workers. Then, after roughly a hundred pages, the high priestess of modernism emerges in dark lyrical tales of disaffection and alienation. With their cosmopolitan settings and points of view, Barnes's mature work displays all the ambiguity, world weariness, and cynicism that distinguish Nightwood (1936), her dense, elusive modern masterpiece. There are several stories about dying aristocrats, beset by age, indifferent to their past. ``The Terrorists'' is a scathing view of la vie boh‚mienne (cafe revolutionaries preach destruction while indulging their appetite for the good life), and the particular horrors of modern life are on view in stories like ``Oscar,'' with its intimations of incest, madness, and murder. Mismatched lovers are common in Barnes's work: older women entertain young men in hopes of staving off decay; a mother falls in love with her daughter's suitor; a doctor's wife randomly beds a salesman to debase herself; a wealthy woman wants to marry her footman; and two coquettish sisters tantalize Parisian gentlemen. At the center of many of these mordant tales are relations that lead to spiritual death, if not actual destruction. ``Dusie,'' a portrait of bohemian lesbians in Paris, recalls the pervasive smolder of decay and decadence in Nightwood. The best were already available in other collections, but it's always worthwhile to see an author complete. Unfortunately, you'll need a bibliography to locate many of these pieces in Barnes's unusual career. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

a road less traveled
Djuna Barnes tops the scale for underappreciated writer of this century. She exhibits a masterful command of the language; fresh metaphors startle on every page, in every paragraph. Each story is different; each character stylistically flawless. For your own sake, please read this book!