This very short book (40 pages) collects three "lost" stories by the modernist writer Djuna Barnes, which she wrote under the pseudonym Lydia Steptoe. They are from the early 1920s and so predate her most famous work, the novel Nightwood.

The three stories collected here are "The Diary of a Dangerous Child", "The Diary of a Small Boy" and "Madame Grows Older: A Journal at the Dangerous Age". They are written with the characteristic verve and wit of Barnes's prose, sustained by a dark humour and a queer sexual charge. The first two stories, to my mind, are the most successful, capturing the strangeness and uncertainty of adolescence desire. In the first story, we meet a teenage girl who intends to lure a Brazilian diplomat to her garden at midnight to teach him a lesson; in the second story a teenage boy takes his father's gun into the woods to protect his cousin from 'water snakes'.

This is a lovely pocket edition and I hope it is the sign that further out of print works by Barnes might be published. ( )