A Night Among the Horses
New York: Horace Liveright, 1929. 2nd Edition. Octavo, publisher's black cloth over orange paper-covered boards, original illustrated dust jacket.
"Well, after he had married her, what then? Satisfy her whim and where would he be? He would be nothing, neither what he had been nor what other people were." Second, expanded edition, of this collection of short works by queer modernist writer Djuna Barnes, her first book, originally published in 1923 under the title A Book. Often thought of as a one-book author for her novel Nightwood (1936), Barnes produced stories, poems, and plays early in her career. In the late 1910s and early 20s she was moving away from journalism and studying the work of Chekhov, Synge, Strindberg, Ibsen, Joyce, and O'Neill. Deeply influenced by them, she began to publish in the Little Review, Smart Set, Vanity Fair, Dial, and the Sunday Telegraph. This expanded edition of many of those stories, plays, and poems reflects her situation as one of the Lost Generation of expat writers and artists in Paris between the wars. Dust jacket designed by Lucinda Goldsborough, who went on to become an award-winning Hollywood and Broadway costume designer under her married name, Lucinda Ballard. Press clippings of contemporary reviews from the Salt Lake City Telegram and Oregon Review laid in. Bookplate to upper pastedown. Tape residue to upper and lower boards, spine gilt rubbed; unclipped dust jacket with moderate chipping to edges, ink bleedthrough to verso, and cellotape residue to verso of upper panel. Withall a very good copy. Item #6806
$650.00