Djuna Barnes: The Lydia Steptoe Stories
Faber Stories
Produkttyp: | eBook-Download |
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Fassung: | Main |
Verlag: | Faber & Faber |
Erschienen: | |
Sprache: | Englisch |
Seiten: | 48 (Druckfassung) |
Format: | EPUB
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Download: | 366 kB |
Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles.
'I have quite changed my mind. I am going to run away and become a boy.'
In these three stories, written by Djuna Barnes under the pseudonym Lydia Steptoe, three characters find themselves on the brink of a sexual awakening - accompanied by guns, whips, and worldly innuendo.
A fourteen-year-old girl plans to become 'a virago', until her mother intercepts her first tryst by dressing up as her male lover. A boy of the same age is lured into the forest by his father's mistress. A woman of forty falls in love and longs to kill herself, so unbearable is the return of the youth she thought she wanted. 'Alice', she tells herself, 'be a man.'
Barnes makes gender and desire seem slippery and joyful - and makes the fictional Lydia Steptoe seem like a writer for our time.