Ryder

by Djuna Barnes, Djuna Barnes (Illustrator), Paul West (Afterword)

Overview

This modernist, experimental, and controversial novel examines gender politics in the lives of an American family.
 
Lesbian poet, journalist, and illustrator Djuna Barnes’s debut novel was a sensation when it was originally published in 1928. A bawdy parody of patriarchal repression, the book was heavily censored upon its release in America. An exploration of sexuality that is thought to be based on Barnes’s own life, the novel depicts a family headed by polygamist Wendell Ryder through the eyes of his daughter, Julia. Employing a variety of literary styles, from parable, poetry, sentimental fiction, and drama, Barnes satirizes masculinity and femininity in one of modern literature’s first and best examinations of gender and power dynamics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781504082181
Publisher:	Open Road Media
Publication date:	01/01/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	250
Sales rank:	620,237
File size:	31 MB
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About the Author

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).
 

Read an Excerpt

Go not with fanatics who see beyond thee and thine, and beyond the coming and the going of thee and thine, and yet beyond the ending thereof,—thy life and the lives that thou begettest, and the lives that shall spring from them, world without end,—for such need thee not, nor see thee, nor know thy lamenting, so confounded are they with thy damnation and the damnation of thy offspring, and the multiple damnation of those multitudes that shall be of thy race begotten, unto the number of fishes in thin waters, and unto the number of fishes in great waters. Alike are they distracted with thy salvation and the salva­tion of thy people. Go thou, then, to lesser men, who have for all things unfinished and uncertain, a great capacity, for these shall not repulse thee, thy physical body and thy temporal agony, thy weeping and thy laughing and thy lamenting. Thy rendezvous is not with the Last Station, but with small comforts, like to apples in the hand, and small cups quenching, and words that go neither here nor there, but traffic with the outer ear, and gossip at the gates of thy insufficient agony.

What People are Saying About This

Eugene Jolas

"A work of grim, mature beauty...she has cought life prismatically in a humor that, I dare say, no women, and few men have succeeded in giving us."

Editorial Reviews

A work of grim, mature beauty . . . she has caught life prismatically.

Eugene Jolas - transition

A work of grim, mature beauty . . . she has caught life prismatically.

transition - Eugene Jolas

A work of grim, mature beauty . . . she has caught life prismatically.”— Eugene Jolas

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