Nightwood
Djuna Barnes · 1936
T.S. Eliot wrote the introduction and called it a masterwork of its time. A fever dream of queer love, obsession, and the night people who live outside convention. Nora's love for Robin Vote is the love of someone who can't stop, who understands she is being destroyed and cannot stop. Formally radical, emotionally raw.
The case against
Doctor O'Connor talks for what feels like half the book, in aphorisms so baroque you lose track of the people they are ostensibly about. Eliot's introduction was a warning label: this reads as poetry or it does not read at all. Come for the doomed love story and you will find monologues standing where the lovers should be.
Romance · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
if this one calls to you, so will these →
