By Djuna Barnes
Introduction by Sarah Schulman
With illustrations by the author
ISBN: 9781628975581
Publication Date: 02/17/2026
A “striking lesbian manifesto and a deft parody” by the acclaimed author of Nightwood. (—Library Journal)
Blending fiction, myth, and revisionary parody, Ladies Almanack is a brilliant modernist composition and arguably the most audacious lesbian text of its time. While the book pokes fun at the wealthy Paris expatriates who were Barnes' literary contemporaries and remains controversial today, it seems to have delighted its cast of characters, who were also the book’s first audience. Arranged by month, it records the life and loves of Dame Evangeline Musset in a robust style taken from Shakespeare and Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. Published for the first time in decades, this edition features Barnes’ original woodcut illustrations and a new introduction by Sarah Schulman.
Praise
"The two things that are extremely impressive about this book are, first, its intellectual energy and rigour and, secondly, Mosley's gift, rivalling Koestler's or Bertrand Russell's, for summarising extremely difficult ideas in an easily intelligible manner." —Spectator
"This is a major novel. I read it barely stopping to eat and sleep. It is the sort of book that one reads again and again, making new discoveries at each reading." —Hampstead & Highgate Express
"Fascinating. . . . The novel achieves grand intellectual drama." —Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times
"The most ambitious English novel written in the past 50 years ... an amazing achievement." —Washington Post Book World
"The culminating volume of a series of five fictions called 'Catastrophe Practice' that may be one of the most important extended literary projects of this century . . . Mosley has been feeling his way toward what is ultimately a hopeful vision of the human prospect after having comprehended—in virtually every sense of the term— the turbulence and torments resulting from this century's fierce intellectual and ideological conflicts." —Chicago Tribune A brilliant literary performance." —Forward
"What makes Hopeful Monsters a successful book is not so much its big ideas but the passionate intelligence through which they're refracted." —San Francisco Chronicle
"A rich panorama of 20th-century politics and ideas and an affecting love story, the novel combines the epic sweep and narrative drive of popular fiction and the intellectual authority of the best of Milan Kundera or Saul Bellow." —Newsday
"Intellectual and emotional history become delicately and provocatively joined in an agile narrative of the wages of hope in a monstrous century. . . . One of the grandest novels of ideas of our time." —Voice Literary Supplement
"Hopeful Monsters's success lies in Mosley's skill at personalizing sweeping historical events and complex theories ... an extraordinary novel." —Boston Globe
"There is, as always in Nicholas Mosley's writing, the pleasure of eloquent ideas eagerly and warmly shared." —Washington Times
Biographical Information
Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) is best known as the author of Nightwood, one of the finest novels of the modernist period. She published works in virtually every genre: short stories, poetry, journalism, drama, and pastiche, often illustrated with her own drawings. A notorious figure in the 1920s and 1930s, she became a recluse in her later years and was largely forgotten. But since her death, a major biography and several critical studies have established her importance in 20th-century literature. Dalkey Archive Press has reissued her Nightwood, Ryder, and Ladies Almanack.
Sarah Schulman is a novelist, playwright, nonfiction writer, screenwriter, and AIDS historian. Her 21st book is The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity.