I Am Alien to Life: Selected Stories

Written by Djuna Barnes and Merve Emre

Narrated by Xe Sands

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."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Oct 22, 2024
• ISBN: 9798855595369

Djuna Barnes

Djuna Barnes was an American modernist writer and visual artist. Her hugely successful novel Nightwood (1936) has become a cult classic of lesbian fiction. Barnes began her career as a journalist and illustrator for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1913. Within a year, Barnes was a highly-sought features reporter and interviewer whose work appeared in the New York City’s leading newspapers and periodicals. Later, Barnes became part of Greenwich Village’s Bohemian community and began publishing her prose, poems, illustrations, and one-act plays in both avant-garde literary journals and popular magazines. She published her first illustrated volume of poetry, The Book of Repulsive Women, in 1915. In 1921, she left New York for Paris, where she published three more works: A Book (1923), Ladies Almanack (1928), and Ryder (1928).