Nightwood is not only a classic of modernist literature, but was also acknowledged by T. S. Eliot as one of the great novels of the 20th century. Eliot admired Djuna Barnes' rich, evocative language. Barnes told a friend that Nightwood was written with her own blood 'while it was still running.' That flowing wound was the breakup of an eight-year relationship with the love of her life. Now recognised as a twentieth-century classic, the influence of Djuna Barnes's novel has been, and continues to be, exceptional.

Nightwood is the story of Robin Vote and those she destroys: her husband "Baron" Felix Volkbein and their child Guido, and the two women who love her, Nora Flood and Jenny Petherbridge. Commenting on them all is Doctor Matthew O'Connor, whose outlandish monologues elevate their romantic losses to the level of Elizabethan tragedy.

The impassioned monologues of Doctor Dante O'Connor reveal the story of Robin Vote, a young American woman in interwar Paris, whose fate is the destruction of all who love her

Based on the Celtic folktale of Tamlynne, The Nightwood tells the story of the young daughter of the Earl of March, who is enticed into the nearby wood by the haunting strains of Elfin music. Inside the mysterious forest, Elaine meets Tamlynne, an enchanted young knight in the court of the Elfin Queen. Elaine and Tamlynne fall in love, but in order for Tamlynne to escape the elves, Elaine must pay a terrible price. In the end, mortal love proves stronger than the power of the Elfin Queen and the two lovers are set free. Beautifully illustrated by Robin Muller, this edition of The Nightwood is sure to enchant fairytale lovers of all ages.

Nightwood Theatre is by far the longest-running and most influential feminist theatre company in Canada. Since 1979 it has been a producer of new works by Canadian women, and a provider of opportunities for women theatre artists. It has also been the "home company" for some of the biggest names in Canadian theatre, such as Ann-Marie MacDonald.

Ranging over depression-era politics, the failures of the League of Nations, popular journalism and the Modernist culture exemplified by such writers as James Joyce and T.S. Eliot, this is a comprehensive exploration of the historical contexts of Djuna Barnes's masterpiece, Nightwood. In Djuna Barnes's Nightwood: 'The World' and the Politics of Peace, Bonnie Roos reads Barnes's novel against the backdrop of Herbert Bayard Swope's popular New York newspaper The World to demonstrate the ways in which the novel wrestles with such contemporaneous issues as the Great Depression and its political fallout, the failures of the League of Nations and the collapse of peace between the two World Wars. Roos argues that Nightwood allegorizes the role of liberal newspapers - epitomised by the sensationalism of The World - in driving a US policy that hastened the arrival of war.

Casey, Gena, and Maryann can think of a way better use of a week than a senior trip to Washington, D.C. Casey's plan is simple. Ditch the trip to D.C., camp out at her parents' amazing cabin in Delonga, and accidentally "run into" Lane and his friends on their fishing trip. She knows the boys will be across the lake--her friends will thank her once they're up there. Three girls for three boys will be the perfect party. After all, what could be more fun than five days in the woods? No curfews, no rules, and no parents. No one will even know they're up there. And no one will hear them when they scream for help. When the first body shows up, it's shocking. When the knock comes on the back door, it's horrifying. And when they realize there's nowhere to hide, they'll wish they were already dead. Surviving a week in the woods is a going to be a whole lot harder than these girls could ever imagine. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Born on the twin backs of torpidity and obsession, In the Beggarly Style of Imitation is a voyage into the mind of one of the Canadian literary underground’s most unruly writers. Equal parts tribute to the historical genesis of the novel and the well-trodden subject of love, the exercises of imitation contained in this collection offer a brief survey through the illustrious forms and genres of literary expression: epistolary, aphorism, essay, picaresque, romance and satire culminate in a celebratory brand of fiction that proves with finality that imitation is truly the vilest form of flattery.

Nightwood - is a good old-fashioned, gothic, supernatural, horror-mystery set in the 1800's in England. Clarice Hart, hired as a governess, arrives at the ominous estate of Nightwood, where she confronts one eerie incident after another - from a strange meeting she witnesses between two of the servants on the night of her arrival, to a shocking death and madness. She is intrigued by a brooding woman she sees walking the cliffs by the sea and becomes privy to a bizarre secret hidden in one of the towers of the immense house. It seems as if almost all the residents of Nightwood carry a terrible, darkness within them. With each step she takes, Clarice draws nearer to not only the answers to Nightwood's sinister mysteries but into an intricate plan controlled by an ancient, supernatural evil.

Roughly chronological, these essays explore Barnes' early work in the New York newspaper world of the 'teens, proceed through the 1954 publication of The Antiphon, and include several approaches to such works as Ryder, Ladies Almanack, and Nightwood. This judicious mix of essays—many of them illustrated by photographs and drawings—presents a comprehensive picture of the creative imagination of Djuna Barnes. Essayists include Mary Lynn Broe, Nancy J. Levine, Ann Larabee, Joan Retallack, Carolyn Allen, Carolyn Burke, Sheryl Stevenson, Marie Ponsot, Frances M. Doughty, Susan Sniader Lanser, Frann Michel, Karla Jay, Jane Marcus, Judith Lee, Julie L. Abraham, Meryl Altman, Lynda Curry, Louise A. DeSalvo, and Catharine Stimpson. Individuals sharing personal recollections of Barnes are Ruth Ford, James B. Scott, Alex Gildzen, Hank O'Neal, Chester Page, Andrew Field, and Frances McCullough. Janice Thom and Kevin Engel provide an updated bibliography. From The Book of Repulsive Women to The Antiphon, Barnes challenged old gender dichotomies as she shaped radical sociopolitical views. Her textual methods celebrated a multiplicity of voices, heterodox forms, and genres, transgressing those tenets of modernism that privilege the “high art” of a single, unified textual identity or a discrete discourse. These essays offer various critical approaches and sinuous readings of the full range of Barnes' achievement. Interwoven through the essays and reminiscences is a lively commentary from Barnes' friends and contemporaries as well as Barnes herself.

it was never going to be okay is a collection of poetry and prose exploring the intimacies of understanding intergenerational trauma, Indigeneity and queerness, while addressing urban Indigenous diaspora and breaking down the limitations of sexual understanding as a trans woman. As a way to move from the linear timeline of healing and coming to terms with how trauma does not exist in subsequent happenings, it was never going to be okay tries to break down years of silence in simpson's debut collection of poetry: i am five my sisters are saying boy i do not know what the word means but-- i am bruised into knowing it: the blunt b, the hollowness of the o, the blade of y

Diane Warren argues that Barnes' writings were significant in their immediate early twentieth-century context, in which gender boundaries were being effectively redrawn, and continue to contribute to present-day debates on identity. By considering all of her major writings, Warren illuminates the danger of assessing individual texts, such as Barnes' best-known novel, Nightwood, in isolation.

In this contemporary fantasy, the grieving biographer of a Victorian fantasist finds himself slipping inexorably into the supernatural world that consumed his subject. Failed father, failed husband, and failed scholar, Charles Hayden hopes to put his life back together with a new project: a biography of Caedmon Hollow, the long-dead author of a legendary Victorian children’s book, In the Night Wood, and forebear of his wife, Erin. Deep in mourning from the loss of their young daughter, they pack up their American lives, Erin gives up her legal practice, and the couple settles in Hollow’s remote Yorkshire mansion. In the neighboring village, Charles meets a woman he might have loved, a child who could have been his own daughter, and the ghost of a self he hoped to bury. Erin, paralyzed by her grief, immerses herself in pills and painting images of a horned terror in the woods. In the primeval forest surrounding Caedmon Hollow’s ancestral home, an ancient power is stirring, a long-forgotten king who haunts the Haydens’ dreams. And every morning the fringe of darkling trees presses closer. Soon enough, Charles and Erin will venture into the night wood. Soon enough, they’ll learn that the darkness under the trees is but a shadow of the darkness that waits inside us all.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Charles Frazier, the acclaimed author of Cold Mountain and Thirteen Moons, returns with a dazzling novel set in small-town North Carolina in the early 1960s. With his brilliant portrait of Luce, a young woman who inherits her murdered sister’s troubled twins, Frazier has created his most memorable heroine. Before the children, Luce was content with the reimbursements of the rich Appalachian landscape, choosing to live apart from the small community around her. But the coming of the children changes everything, cracking open her solitary life in difficult, hopeful, dangerous ways. In a lean, tight narrative, Nightwoods resonates with the timelessness of a great work of art. “Impossible to shake.”—Entertainment Weekly “Fantastic.”—The Washington Post “Astute and compassionate.”—The Boston Globe

Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture explores the emergence of what Nancy Bombaci terms «late modernist freakish aesthetics» - a creative fusion of «high» and «low» themes and forms in relation to distorted bodies. Literary and cinematic texts about «freaks» by Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, and Carson McCullers subvert and reinvent modern progress narratives in order to challenge high modernist literary and social ideologies. These works are marked by an acceptance of the disteleology, anarchy, and degeneration that racist discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries associated with racial and ethnic outsiders, particularly Jews. In a period of American culture beset with increasing pressures for social and political conformity and with the threat of fascism from Europe, these late modernist narratives about «freaks» defy oppressive norms and values as they search for an anarchic and transformational creativity.

In France in 1933, two sisters, presumed to be lovers, murdered the women who employed them as maids. Known as “the Papin affair,” the incident inspired not only Jean Genet's 1947 The Maids but also an essay by Jacques Lacan that presents the sisters' crime as fueled by a narcissistic, homosexual drive that culminated in the assault. In this new investigation of the roots of the twentieth-century myth of the lesbian-as-madwoman, Christine Coffman argues that the female psychotic was the privileged object of Lacan’s effort to derive a revolutionary theory of subjectivity from the study of mental illness. Examining Lacan's early writings, French surrealism, Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, and H.D.’s homoerotic fiction in light of feminist and queer theory, Insane Passions argues that the psychotic woman that fascinates modernist writers returns with a murderous vengeance in a number of late twentieth-century films—including Basic Instinct, Sister My Sister, Single White Female, and Murderous Maids. Marking the limit of social acceptability, the “psychotic lesbian” repeatedly appears as the screen onto which the violence and madness of twentieth-century life are projected.