Beginning in 1914, Djuna Barnes contributed regularly to numerous magazines and newspapers works of fiction, poetry, essay, and drama. Unlike some works in other genres in which she wrote, Barnes held her stories in particularly high regard, revising several of the stories collected in A Book (1923; reprinted as A Night Among the Horses in 1929) late in her life. These stories from Spillway, her other early tales, and other stories never before published are collected in this volume. What they reveal is the breadth and consistency of Barnes's story writing, and should help establish her as one of the most interesting and vital storytellers of the great period of American literary output after World War I.
Barnes is recognized internationally for her masterwork Nightwood and for other works of fiction, including Ryder and Ladies Almanack. She also wrote plays, most notably The Antiphon-which will be republished by Sun & Moon Press next year-and shorter works collected in At the Roots of the Stars: The Short Plays. Her early poetic work, The Book of Repulsive Women, has increasingly gainer readers over the past few years. A selection of her drawings, which often accompanied her literary writing, has just been published by Sun & Moon Press as Poe's Mother.Amazon.com ReviewDjuna Barnes, best known for her 1936 novel Nightwood, was a modernist with a fertile talent, who worked as an illustrator, a reporter, and a feature writer for newspapers and avant-garde magazines in the first half of this century. In their playfulness with words and syntax, the short stories in this volume, written between 1914 and 1942 and collected by her biographer, Phillip Herring, show the influence of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. Many were written for magazines and end with a plot twist. As one might expect from a visual artist, these stories are full of symbolic images, often hauntingly grotesque.
