December 3: Karla Kelsey and Merve Emre in Conversation

Presented by 192 Books, Karla Kelsey and Merve Emre discuss three books by or about Mina Loy and Djuna Barnes

This event will take place in person at 192 Books at 192 10th Ave on Tuesday, December 3rd at 7:00 PM ET. Seating is limited. RSVP for free here. The discussion will also be streamed directly on this page. There is no login required. A recording will be archived.

Books will be available for sale after the conversation.

Karla Kelsey—Transcendental Factory: For Mina Loy (Winter Editions, 2024)

Though Mina Loy was at the center of several modernist milieus—her friends and fans included Djuna Barnes, Constantin Brâncuși, Marcel Duchamp, and Gertrude Stein—nearly all of her visual art has been lost and much of her writing has only been published posthumously or remains in manuscript. Reminiscent of the poetic-biographical strategies of such works as Nathalie Léger’s Suite for Barbara Loden, Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson, and Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book, Karla Kelsey’s novel of Loy’s life creates a resonating space for the lost and unarchived. Combining experimental biography with fiction and fact, Transcendental Factory elevates networks, constellations, and tracings over conventional chronology.

Mina Loy—Lost Writings: Two Novels by Mina Loy (ed. Karla Kelsey, Yale University Press, 2024)

Featuring two never-before-published manuscripts of Mina Loy’s autobiographical prose—The Child and the Parent and Islands in the Air—this remarkable book expands Loy’s rich oeuvre. Interlinked texts written over twenty years, from the 1930s to the 1950s, these fascinating works narrate the feminist struggle of the creative spirit as it comes into consciousness and encounters indoctrinating social norms. The works are accompanied by an introduction and afterword by Karla Kelsey that frame Loy as a poet, prose writer, businesswoman, and visual artist and discuss the texts, their stylistic innovations, and their unique interconnectedness.

Mina Loy (1882–1966) is an essential figure of the European and American modernist avant-garde. A groundbreaking writer of poetry, novels, essays, plays, and uncategorizable prose, she was also a fashion and lighting designer and an accomplished visual artist. Loy has been best known for the poetry she published in the little magazines of the late 1910s and early '20s, most notably the long poem “Songs to Joannes” and the autobiographical verse-epic “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose.”

Djuna Barnes—I Am Alien to Life: Selected Stories (ed. Merve Emre, McNally Editions, 2024)

Here are all the stories Djuna Barnes sought to preserve, in the versions she preferred, as well as a smattering of rarities as selected by critic and The New Yorker contributor Merve Emre. These are tales of women “‘tragique’ and ‘triste’ and ‘tremendous’ all at once,” of sons and daughters being initiated into the ugly comedy of life, monuments all to a worldview singular and scathing. As Emre writes in her foreword, “[Barnes’s] themes are love and death, especially in Paris and New York; the corruption of nature by culture; the tainted innocence of children; and the mute misery of beasts. . . . Her characters may be alien to life, but they are alive—spectacularly, grotesquely alive.”

Djuna Barnes (1892–1982) is rightly remembered for her breakthrough and final novel, Nightwood, a hallmark of modernist literature and one of the first, strangest, and most brilliant novels of love between women to be published in the 20th century. Barnes’s career began long before Nightwood, however, with journalism, essays, drama, and satire of extraordinary wit and courage. Long into her later life, after World War II, when she published nothing more, it was her short fiction above all that she prized and would continue to revise.

Karla Kelsey is the author of seven books, most recently the poet’s novel Transcendental Factory: For Mina Loy (Winter Editions) and the poetry collection On Certainty (Omnidawn). She is the editor of Lost Writings: Two Novels by Mina Loy (Yale University Press) and co-publisher of SplitLevel Texts.

Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and the Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. Her books include Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, The Personality Brokers (selected as one of the best books of 2018 by the New York Times, The Economist, NPR, and The Spectator), The Ferrante Letters (winner of the 2021 PROSE award for literature), and The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway. She has been awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize, the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism, and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker.