Nightwood
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Description
Nightwood, Djuna Barnes' strange and sinuous tour de force, "belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch" (Times Literary Supplement). That time is the period between the two World Wars, and Barnes' novel unfolds in the decadent shadows of Europe's great cities, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna--a world in which the boundaries of class, religion, and sexuality are bold but surprisingly porous.The outsized characters who inhabit this world are some of the most memorable in all of fiction--there is Guido Volkbein, the Wandering Jew and son of a self-proclaimed baron; Robin Vote, the American expatriate who marries him and then engages in a series of affairs, first with Nora Flood and then with Jenny Petherbridge, driving all of her lovers to distraction with her passion for wandering alone in the night; and there is Dr. Matthew-Mighty-Grain-of-Salt-Dante-O'Connor, a transvestite and ostensible gynecologist, whose digressive speeches brim with fury, keen insights, and surprising allusions. Barnes' depiction of these characters and their relationships (Nora says, "A man is another persona woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic; on her mouth you kiss your own") has made the novel a landmark of feminist and lesbian literature.
Most striking of all is Barnes' unparalleled stylistic innovation, which led T. S. Eliot to proclaim the book "so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it." Now with a new preface by Jeanette Winterson, Nightwood still crackles with the same electric charge it had on its first publication in 1936.
Product Details
Price
$14.95
$13.90
Publisher
New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publish Date
September 26, 2006
Pages
208
Dimensions
5.1 X 7.9 X 0.5 inches | 0.45 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9780811216715
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Become an affiliateAbout the Author
Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) was born in Cornwall-on-Hudson, NY, and worked as a journalist in New York before leaving the country to spend many years in Paris and London. She returned to New York in 1941, and lived in Greenwich Village until her death.
Born in Manchester, England, Jeanette Winterson is the author of seventeen books, including the national bestseller Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and The Passion. She has won many prizes including the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the E. M. Forster Award, and the Stonewall Award.
THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He moved to England in 1914 and published his first book of poems in 1917. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Eliot died in 1965.
Reviews
What I would leave the reader prepared to find is the great achievement of of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliant of wit and characterization 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 novel of extraordinary and appalling force...a kind of symbol of sinister magnificence.-- "The New York Times"
One of the great masterworks of twentieth-century fiction.-- "Vogue"
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. You have taken in more than you know, and it will go on doing its work. From now on a part of your is pearl-lined.--Jeanette Winterson
Djuna Barnes is 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
A masterpiece of modernism.-- "The Washington Post Book World"
To have been madly and disastrously in love is a kind of glory that can only be made intelligible in a sublime poetry--the revelatory and layered poetry of Djuna Barnes's masterpiece, Nightwood.--Dorothy Allison, author of the National Book Award-nominated novel Bastard Out of Carolina
One of the greatest books of the twentieth century.--William S. Burroughs
A novel of extraordinary and appalling force...a kind of symbol of sinister magnificence.-- "The New York Times"
One of the great masterworks of twentieth-century fiction.-- "Vogue"
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. You have taken in more than you know, and it will go on doing its work. From now on a part of your is pearl-lined.--Jeanette Winterson
Djuna Barnes is 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
A masterpiece of modernism.-- "The Washington Post Book World"
To have been madly and disastrously in love is a kind of glory that can only be made intelligible in a sublime poetry--the revelatory and layered poetry of Djuna Barnes's masterpiece, Nightwood.--Dorothy Allison, author of the National Book Award-nominated novel Bastard Out of Carolina