""Lesbianism, its flories and sorows, is the subject and quest of this marvelously erverse sentimental journey by Nightwood's author ... A striking lesbian mainfesto and a deft parody." Library Journal Blending fiction, myth, and revisionary parody and accompanied by the author's delightful illustrations, Ladies Almanac is also a brilliant modernist composition and arguably the most audacious lesbian text of its time. While the book pokes fun at the wealthy expatriates who were Barnes' literary contemporaries and remains controversial today, it seems to have delighted its cast of characters,
"Lesbianism, its flories and sorows, is the subject and quest of this marvelously erverse sentimental journey by Nightwood's author... A striking lesbian mainfesto and a deft parody." —Library Journal Blending fiction, myth, and revisionary parody and accompanied by the author's delightful illustrations, Ladies Almanac is also a brilliant modernist composition and arguably the most audacious lesbian text of its time. While the book pokes fun at the wealthy expatriates who were Barnes' literary contemporaries and remains controversial today, it seems to have delighted its cast of characters, which was also the first audience. Barney herself subsidized its private publication in 1928. Fifty of the 1050 copies of the first edition were hand colored by the author, who was identified only as a lady of Fashion: on the title page.
Heap (1883-1964) was a writer, artist, Manhattan gallery owner, and coeditor of the Little Review, and as a dynamic figure of the international avant-garde created a life that defined the modernist experience between the world wars. Baggett (American history and gender studies, Southwest Missouri State U.) reveals her more intimate side primarily through her letters to Florence, and finds there insight into the struggle for lesbian identity and community. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
The subject of bisexuality continues to divide the lesbian and gay community. At pride marches, in films such as Go Fish, at academic conferences, the role and status of bisexuals is hotly contested. Within lesbian communities, formed to support lesbians in a patriarchal and heterosexist society, bisexual women are often perceived as a threat or as a political weakness. Bisexual women feel that they are regarded with suspicion and distrust, if not openly scorned. Drawing on her research with over 400 bisexual and lesbian women, surveying the treatment of bisexuality in the lesbian and gay press, and examining the recent growth of a self-consciously political bisexual movement, Paula Rust addresses a range of questions pertaining to the political and social relationships between lesbians and bisexual women. By tracing the roots of the controversy over bisexuality among lesbians back to the early lesbian feminist debates of the 1970s, Rust argues that those debates created the circumstances in which bisexuality became an inevitable challenge to lesbian politics. She also traces it forward, predicting the future of sexual politics.
Seventeen essayists study this enigmatic author's works--not in the traditional style in which they were first reviewed, but rather through a range of contemporary interpretations that resituate Barnes in the context of literary theory and feminist revisions of modernism. Paper edition (unseen), $13.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
"Allen's book will... provide the categories that will deepen our understanding of lesbian relationships and of lesbian fiction." -- Lesbian Review of Books "Barnes scholars will... want to pick up Carolyn Allen's new book, for it not only offers perceptive readings of Nightwood and the "Little Girl" stories..., but traces the example of Barnes's exploration of lesbian power and loss in the fiction of Jeanette Winterson, Rebecca Brown, and the underrated Bertha Harris." -- Review of Contemporary Fiction "... fascinating... [a] fine volume... " -- Choice "Following Djuna is a fascinating analysis of the textual erotics and lyrical seductions of the work of Djuna Barnes and the writers she influences. This scintillating genealogy of lesbian intertextuality... expands the field of lesbian and feminist literary inquiry and concepts of lesbian literary production." -- Judith Roof "As lesbian literary history, here is an instant classic." -- Jane Marcus "This is an important and necessary book; even further, speaking as an admirer of the writers and literary works it discusses and as a personal expert on lost love, I find Following Djuna irrestible." -- Karen Helfrich, Lambda Book Report Carolyn Allen argues for the importance of women's fiction in understanding women's erotics -- emotional and sexual exchanges between women.
Wild Girls is the critically acclaimed true story of two wealthy American heiresses---one an artist, the other a writer---whose stormy, passionate love affair captivated Paris’s salon set between the wars. Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks were rich, American, eccentric, and grandly lesbian. They met in Paris in 1915, and their relationship lasted more than fifty years, despite infidelity, separation, and temperamental differences. Romaine Brooks, a painter, was the product of an unhappy childhood and trusted no one but Natalie. Natalie Barney was passionate about life, sex, and love. Her Friday afternoon salons, attended by Gertrude Stein, and Colette and Edith Sitwell, were a magnet for social introductions and cultural innovations. Drawing from letters, papers, and paintings, Diana Souhami, the award-winning author of Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter, re-creates the lives and loves of this pair of dazzling and wild women. “Epic romance . . . smartly sex-positive and so good-naturedly shocking.” ---The New York Times Book Review “Real tenderness and pathos . . . not only entertaining but affecting reading.” ---The Washington Post “Their friends were the most bohemian, their parties the most risqué, their tortured love affair the most notorious in Europe. Diana Souhami tells a remarkable tale.” ---The Sunday Telegraph (UK)
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'.
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.
