Short Synopsis
This fiery and enigmatic masterpiece by Djuna Barnes has been called one of the greatest novels of the Modernist era.

Full Synopsis
Nightwood, Djuna Barnes's strange and sinuous tour de force novel unfolds in the decadent shadows of Europe's great cities, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna—a world in which the boundaries of class, religion, and sexuality are bold but surprisingly porous.

The outsized characters who inhabit this world are some of the most memorable in all of fiction—there is Guido Volkbein, the Wandering Jew and son of a self-proclaimed baron; Robin Vote, the American expatriate who marries him and then engages in a series of affairs, first with Nora Flood and then with Jenny Petherbridge, driving all of her lovers to distraction with her passion for wandering alone in the night; and there is Dr. Matthew-Mighty-Grain-of-Salt-Dante-O'Connor, a transvestite and ostensible gynecologist, whose digressive speeches brim with fury, keen insights, and surprising allusions. Barnes's depiction of these characters and their relationships has made the novel a landmark of feminist and lesbian literature.

"One of the great masterworks of twentieth-century fiction." ---Vogue

"A masterpiece of modernism." ---The Washington Post Book World

"To have been madly and disastrously in love is a kind of glory that can only be made intelligible in a sublime poetry-the revelatory and layered poetry of Djuna Barnes's masterpiece, Nightwood." ---Dorothy Allison, author of the National Book Award-nominated novel Bastard Out of Carolina