January 20th6:30pm
Are you overwhelmed by the pressure to keep up with the continuous barrage of new book releases? Are you interested in reading beyond the margins of today’s contemporary literary discourse? Do you want to inject a bit of surprise and intrigue into your reading life? Our club is centered around books that have been largely forgotten, the reissued classics and rare finds that have slipped from the mainstream and are waiting to be discovered by a new set of readers.
This month we'll discuss the best of Djuna Barnes’s dark, droll, incisive short fiction, spanning her all-too-brief career, I Am Alien to Life: Selected Stories. We will be joined by Merve Emre, who edited and introduced the collection!
“Like a dark lesbian genius rolling in a giant heap of damp, dead leaves.”— Eileen Myles
“The great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterisation, and a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy.” — T. S. Eliot
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.”
Reserve your place with a $5 voucher, redeemable on the night of the book club meeting on any product in store.