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RyderAuthor: Djuna Barnes American Literature Series May 1990 250 pages, 6 x 9 Dimensions: Paperback, 0-916583-55-4 Retail Paperback Price: Our Paperback Price: $9.56—20% OFF! 
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Book Description
When it was first published in 1928, Djuna Barnes's Ryder, a bawdy mock-Elizabethan chronicle of a family very much like her own, was described in the Saturday Review as "the most amazing book ever written by a woman."
One of modern literature's first and best denunciations of patriarchal repression, Ryder employs an exuberant prose by which narrator Julie Ryder derides her hated father, polygamous Wendell Ryder. Barnes satirizes masculinity and domesticity by way of parable, poem, and play, and a prose style that echoes Chaucer, Shakespeare, the Bible, and Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.
For this edition, several of Barnes's previously suppressed illustrations have been restored, and novelist Paul West has contributed a perceptive afterword.
About the Author
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Djuna Barnes (1892-1982), an American, was one of the key female modernist writers and an important figure in the bohemian Paris of the 1920s and '30s. Barnes spent the final forty years of her life as a recluse in New York City. Though she was largely overlooked during her lifetime and, indeed, had difficulty finding publishers for even her best work, interest in, and acclaim for, her writing has grown since her death. |
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Praise
"Djuna Barnes has written a book that is all that she was, and must still be—vulgar, beautiful, defiant, witty, poetic, and a little mad—a bewildering hodgepodge of the obscene and the virginal, of satire and wistfulness, of the grossest humor and the most delicate sadness—a book that absolutely baffles classification, but that surely is a most amazing thing to have come from a woman's hand."—The Argonaut"A work of grim, mature beauty . . . she has caught life prismatically in a humor that, I dare say, no women, and few men, have succeeded in giving us."—Eugene Jolas, Transition