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Essays, Manifestos, Statements, Speeches, Maxims, Epistles, Diaristic Jottings, Narratives, Natural histories, Poems, Plays, Performances, Ramblings, Revelations, and all such ephemera as may appear necessary to bring society into a slight tremolo of confusion and fright at least.

New York

Djuna Barnes

Edited with a Commentary by Alyce Barry, with a Foreword by Douglas Messerli

Digital Only

A Sun & Moon title.

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Like Barnes's magical Interviews, these unforgettable pieces were published in newspapers and magazines from 1911-1931. The exuberant works of this book all center upon New York City, including wonderful portraits of Brooklyn's Wallabout Market, the Hippodrome Circus, a Manhattan Boxing Club, the Italian theater in the Bowery, Coney Island, Printing House Square, and a tour of the city with World War I soldiers. Barnes undergoes force-feeding from police in order to understand the techniques used upon feminist agitators who had gone on hunger strikes; she is rescued by firemen, tangoed around the floor of local dancehalls, and lectured to by "sensible" New Yorkers Jane Cowl, Enrico Caruso, and Montgomery Flagg regarding their secret superstitions. Whether satirizing her Bohemian friends, Floyd Dell, Max Eastman, and Marsden Hartley, or investigating Brooklyn squatters, Barnes brings to New York her wit and brilliant powers of observation.

New York is a book for anyone who has ever felt the energy, the excitement, the beauty and ugliness of the "Big Apple."