I Am Alien to Life: Selected Stories

The best of Djuna Barnes’s dark, droll, incisive short fiction, spanning her all-too-brief career, edited and introduced by Merve Emre.

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.＂

Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) was born on Storm King Mountain in New York State. She worked as a journalist during World War I before leaving the United States to spend the inter-war years in Paris and London among the most celebrated writers and artists of the twentieth century. She returned to New York in 1941 and lived in Greenwich Village until her death. She published three novels as well as short fiction, nonfiction, poetry, skits, and a three-act play between 1914 and 1950.

Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and a contributing writer at the New Yorker.