This collection of stories are full of radical metaphors and inscrutable endings. Some of the metaphors, pulled out and contemplated individually are amazing and fabulous and some of the characters are memorable but overall the web seemed too dense. ( )

I have the l985 edition by Virago Modern Classics Press. The cover shows a detail from "Card Players" by Tamara de Lempicka, which I think quite suits the era and mood.

14 incisive tales in the book wonderfully evoke Greenwich Village Bohemia between 1914 and 1916. Her writing is exquisite and decadent and full of lovers and loners, schemers and dreamers and more. Beginning in 1923, when Djuna was 21, and through the next 6 yrs, she published over 100 articles and interviews in New York newspapers as well as 25 dramas and fiction pieces in the New York Morning Telegraph's Sunday magazine. These fiction stories add one more important chapter to what Eugune Jolas called " The revolution of the word". ( )