Djuna Barnes

A “striking lesbian manifesto and a deft parody” by the acclaimed author of Nightwood. (—Library Journal) Blending fiction, myth, and revisionary parody, Ladies Almanack is a brilliant modernist composition and arguably the most audacious lesbian text of its time. While the book pokes fun at the wealthy Paris expatriates who were Barnes'' literary contemporaries and remains controversial today, it seems to have delighted its cast of characters, who were also the book’s first audience. Arranged by month, it records the life and loves of Dame Evangeline Musset in a robust style taken from Shakespeare and Robert Burton''s Anatomy of Melancholy. Published for the first time in decades, this edition features Barnes’ original woodcut illustrations and a new introduction by Sarah Schulman.

'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.