Djuna Barnes S Nightwood

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 ... T he 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 Hustvedt Nightwood 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

Barnes's affectionate lampoon of the expatriate lesbian community in Paris was privately printed in 1928. Arranged by month, it records the life and loves of Dame Evangeline Musset (modeled after salon hostess Natalie Barney) in a robust style taken from Shakespeare and Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, and is illustrated throughout with Barnes's own drawings. This new edition is a facsimile of the 1928 edition with the addition of an afterword providing details on the book's origins and a key to its real-life models.

Why is Shrek one of the greatest selling DVDs of all time? Why are shampoo advertisements based on Sleeping Beauty? Why is it that the same simple stories keep being told? This study attempts to explain why fairy tales keep popping up in the most unexpected places and why the best storytellers begin their tales with 'once upon a time'.

Daniela Caselli raises timely questions about Djuna Barnes, biography and feminist criticism, identity and authority, and modernist canon formation and tackles a central issue in Barnes: intertextuality. Caselli shows that throughout Barnes's corpus, the repetition of texts, by other authors (from Blake to Middleton) and by Barnes herself, forces us to rethink the relationship between authority and gender in modernism.

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.

A collection of essays on the work of Djuna Barnes, including her early journalism, poetry, prose, visual art, and drama.

Djuna Barnes's great verse drama, written in part about her own family, was first published in 1958, and was last reprinted in her Selected Writings of 1962. Since that time the play has been out of print. The play certainly is a strange one; even the author observes in her cautionary note to the volume that 'a misreading of the Antiphon is not impossible'.