Hosts Catherine Nichols and Sandra Newman discuss the novel Nightwood, focusing in this episode on the extraordinary life and career of its author, Djuna Barnes, who lived among the most extreme personalities of 1920s Paris and was celebrated as one of Modernism's great writers, but then withdrew into total seclusion for the last 40 years of her life.

For some background on this episode, here's Robert Giroux reminiscing about the experience of being Barnes's publisher: https://www.nytimes.com/1985/12/01/books/the-most-famous-unknown-in-the-world-remembering-djuna-barnes.html. And here's a very rare recording of Barnes herself, reading from her play "The Antiphon" (with really abysmal sound quality and a lot of setting up, but somehow that feels like part of the Barnes experience): https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/05/12/greenwich-village-1971/
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