Nightwood

By Djuna Barnes,

Book cover of Nightwood

Book description

Nightwood, Djuna Barnes' strange and sinuous tour de force, "belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch" (Times Literary Supplement). That time is the period between the two World Wars, and Barnes' novel unfolds in the decadent shadows of Europe's great cities, Paris,…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Nightwood as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I can’t name what so destroyed me about this book; it speaks to a level of pain for which there’s no language.

I believe a book’s hidden subject will chase a writer down: a fear, a state of mind. Barnes had to write it in order to survive her experience.

A loose group of outcasts appears in Nightwood: a gay doctor, logorrheic, poetic, desperate, witty, alone. A woman obsessed with another woman whom has left her and whom she’ll never reach, never understand.

Dancers and circus performers all in the baroque shimmer of a prose so fascinating it becomes…

From Blair's list on opening strange worlds.

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