Nightwood

"Nightwood, Djuna Barnes's strange and sinuous tour de force, has become a classic of modernist and lesbian literature since its first publication in 1936. Set in Paris, Berlin, and Vienna during the decadent period between the two World Wars, Nightwood "belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch" (TLS)." "It is the story of Robin Vote and those she destroys-her husband the "Baron," their child Guido, and the two women, Nora and Jenny, who love her; the whole is illumined by the fantastic monologues of the renegade doctor Matthew O'Connor. Most striking of all is Barnes's unparalleled stylistic innovation, which led T.S. Eliot to proclaim the book "so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it," and The New York Times Book Review to assert: "Admired by Joyce, Nightwood is as important to the history of the 20th-century novel as Finnegans Wake-and more readable."--Jacket.