I Am Alien to Life: Selected Stories (McNally Editions) - Softcover

Barnes, Djuna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1961341220 ISBN 13: 9781961341227

Publisher: McNally Editions, 2024

Synopsis

“Like a dark lesbian genius rolling in a giant heap of damp, dead leaves.” —Eileen Myles

“This supple collection from Barnes shaves the themes of lost innocence, unrequited love, and death of her modernist masterwork, Nightwood, into febrile confessions . . . These memorable sketches unfurl a barbed wisdom of the grave.” —Publishers Weekly

The best of Djuna Barnes’s dark, droll, incisive short fiction, spanning her all-too-pief 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 pilliant 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.”

About this title

About the Authors

Djuna Barnes (1892–1982) was born on Storm King Mountain in New York State. She worked as a journalist during World War I before leaving the United States to spend the inter-war years in Paris and London among the most celebrated writers and artists of the twentieth century. She returned to New York in 1941 and lived in Greenwich Village until her death. She published three novels as well as short fiction, nonfiction, poetry, skits, and a three-act play between 1914 and 1950.

Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and a contributing writer at the New Yorker.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Merve Emre

1. A Night Among the Horses

2. The Valet

3. No-Man’s-Mare

4. Oscar

5. The Rabbit

6. The Doctors

7. Smoke

8. The Terrorists

9. Who is This Tom Scarlett?

10. Spillway

11. Indian Summer

12. The Robin’s House

13. The Passion

14. Aller et Retour

15. A Small Boy Asks a Question

16. The Perfect Murder

17. Cassation

18. The Grande Malade

19. Dusie

20. Behind the Heart

Edition details

• Publisher: McNally Editions
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1961341220
• ISBN 13: 9781961341227
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240