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Djuna Barnes

Djuna Barnes’s Followers (560)

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Djuna Barnes


Born
in Storm King Mountain, Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, The United States
June 12, 1892

Died
June 18, 1982

Genre
Fiction, Gay and Lesbian


Djuna Barnes was an artist, illustrator, journalist, playwright, and poet associated with the early 20th-century Greenwich Village bohemians and the Modernist literary movement.

Barnes has been cited as an influence by writers as diverse as Truman Capote, William Goyen, Isak Dinesen, John Hawkes, and Anaïs Nin. Bertha Harris described her work as "practically the only available expression of lesbian culture we have in the modern western world" since Sappho.

Barnes played an important part in the development of 20th century English language modernist writing and was one of the key figures in 1920s and 30s bohemian Paris after filling a similar role in the Greenwich Village of the teens. Her novel Nightwood became a cult work of modern fiction, ...more

Combine Editions

Average rating: 3.62 · 18,359 ratings · 2,413 reviews · 95 distinct works • Similar authors
Nightwood
by
3.60 avg rating — 14,627 ratings — published 1936 — 101 editions
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The Lydia Steptoe Stories
3.37 avg rating — 596 ratings — 5 editions
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Ladies Almanack
3.62 avg rating — 505 ratings — published 1928 — 53 editions
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The Book of Repulsive Women...
3.70 avg rating — 408 ratings — published 1989 — 23 editions
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Ryder
by
3.66 avg rating — 274 ratings — published 1928 — 25 editions
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Smoke: and Other Early Stories
3.65 avg rating — 191 ratings — published 1917 — 16 editions
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Spillway and Other Stories
3.63 avg rating — 160 ratings — published 1923 — 19 editions
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I Am Alien to Life: Selecte...
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3.85 avg rating — 104 ratings — 6 editions
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Collected Stories
3.80 avg rating — 71 ratings — published 1996 — 7 editions
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The Antiphon
3.70 avg rating — 64 ratings — published 1958 — 15 editions
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More books by Djuna Barnes…
Quotes by Djuna Barnes  (?)
Quotes are added by the Goodreads community and are not verified by Goodreads. (Learn more)

“A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow.”
― Djuna Barnes
tags: jungism, personhood, shadow-self
1287 likes
Like

“The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
tags: pain
965 likes
Like

“I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
141 likes
Like

Polls

June 2025 New School Poll

 
  45 votes, 23.1%

The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain (1936) 116 pages, last read January 2019
 
  37 votes, 19.0%

The Quiet American by Graham Greene (1955) 180 pages
 
  34 votes, 17.4%

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill (1983) 138 pages
 
  31 votes, 15.9%

Peyton Place by Grace Metalious (1956) 372 pages
 
  18 votes, 9.2%

Manhatten Transfer by John Dos Passos (1925) 342 pages
 
  17 votes, 8.7%

Nightwood by Djuna Barnes (1936) 182 pages
 
  13 votes, 6.7%

195 total votes
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