Name: I Am Alien to Life: Selected Stories
Price: 32.08 NZD
Availability: InStock
Author: Djuna Barnes
ISBN: 9781961341227

portada I Am Alien to Life: Selected Stories

Type

Physical Book

Author

Djuna Barnes

Preface by

Merve Emre

Publisher

McNally Editions

Language

English

Pages

240

Format

Paperback

Dimensions

21.6 x 12.7 x 1.5 cm

Weight

0.18 kg.

ISBN13

9781961341227

Synopsis "I Am Alien to Life: Selected Stories"

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 novel: 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."

Djuna Barnes

(Author)

View Author's Page

(Cornwall-on-the-Hudson, 1892 - New York, 1980) American writer. After being privately educated by her father and grandmother, she moved to New York to study art. She quickly became part of the avant-garde in Greenwich Village, where she met, among others, Robert Frost, Eugene O'Neill, Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, and Marianne Moore. Around the 1920s, like almost all American artists and writers, she moved to Paris. During the interwar years, she frequented major figures from the world of cinema and literature, from Charles Chaplin and Marcel Duchamp to James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Alexis Carrel, Samuel Beckett, and Ernest Hemingway.

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