On Strike Against God - Joanna Russ

On Strike Against God

By: Joanna Russ, Alec Pollak (Editor)

Paperback | 1 December 2024

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  • Reissuing an out-of-print classic: In a time when reissued classic works by women are becoming more popular, a new edition of On Strike against God, out of print for over thirty years, will provide a fresh opportunity to engage with an artifact of the women's movement. On Strike is a first-person, thoroughly autobiographical novel that promises to reconfigure its author's public standing and reinvigorate her legacy. Russ was a prominent feminist thinker known for her science fiction; On Strike will introduce another dimension of Russ's life to a hungry reading public.

Expanding the legacy of Joanna Russ: Over the last two decades, Russ has shed her status as a semi-subcultural cult figure and claimed a popular spotlight all her own; her growing media presence attests to widespread public interest in her life and work. The Female Man (1975) has been steadily in print through Beacon Press since 2000, and Wesleyan University Press republished the novels We Who Are About To... and Picnic on Paradise in 2005 and 2007 respectively. The University of Texas Press republished How to Suppress Women's Writing in 2018, and in 2019, University of Illinois Press published Joanna Russ, Gwyneth Jones's critically acclaimed and widely reviewed critical biography. Within the last five years, Russ has been featured in The New Yorker, Wired, PopMatters, Times Literary Supplement, Kirkus, and The Independent. The recent surge of interest in science fiction, and especially feminist science fiction, has bolstered Russ's visibility and appeal not only as a writer of science fiction but as a significant and multidimensional figure outside her home genre. A long-time friend of Samuel Delany, Ursula Le Guin, Philip K. Dick, Adrienne Rich, James Tiptree Jr., and others, Russ features regularly in interviews, biographies, and other exposs on the rise of literary feminism, feminist science fiction, and New Wave science fiction.

Commissioned front and back matter: Samuel R. Delany will write an essay on his decades-long friendship and correspondence with Joanna Russ. Russ scholar and the project's editor, Alec Pollak, will write an introduction reflecting on and contextualizing this work. Another writer from a younger generation will write about Russ's impact on their thinking and the field of gender studies.

Industry Reviews

"I read and reread On Strike Against God when I was in my early twenties, riveted by its strange amalgam of coming-out story, campus novel, cri de coeur, and vertiginous Nabokovian stand-up routine. Russ was both enlisting me in her struggle and, I see now, throwing me a rope so I wouldn't have to struggle quite as much as she did. Alec Pollak's critical edition offers up an utterly delightful array of historical, contemporary, and personal context that I hope will assure this curious and powerful revolutionary work the recognition it merits." -Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home

"Joanna Russ's work is a gift and so is everything else in this deep little volume. On Strike Against God is a beautiful historical document that shows us, today, what it looks like to create language for a world of experience that we have not yet managed to articulate. Plus it's funny, if you're cool." -Imogen Binnie, author of Nevada

"Joanna Russ possesses a ferocious, formidable intelligence, so blazing you almost expect the page to burn to ash as you read it. To engage with her is to become aware of the ways in which the world wounds us and our own ability to, in turn, imagine and then demand that the world change for the better. Russ's nonfiction, her novels, her short stories are essential, singular works, and I have wanted with all my heart for a very long time to see them back in print again." -Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble

"Angry, funny, sharp, and intense, On Strike Against God captures the feel of the feminist revolution of the 1970s with unusual brilliance." -Kim Stanley Robinson, author of Red Mars

"What a delight to be reading Joanna Russ again. On Strike Against God showcases her stylistic brilliance, the intimacy and courage of her voice, the warp-speed flights of her brain. Excellent supporting materials an added bonus." -Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

"An immensely important, subversive book that's as hilarious and deliciously fun to read as it is deadly serious. Russ reckons with the confusion and heartache of claiming identity and love in a world that refuses to acknowledge her existence-a reality present-day lesbians and queer people might find familiar. Paired with several of Russ's field-shaping essays, the book examines the nature of pleasure, friendship, conversation, and self-knowledge and offers a window onto a world in which the narrator-and the reader, by proxy-might finally be allowed to exist." -Jenn Shapland, author of My Autobiography of Carson McCullers

"A powerful, witty, revelatory meditation on culture and identity as only Russ could do it." -Kameron Hurley, author of The Light Brigade

"This is a miracle of a book! On Strike Against God is Joanna Russ's mainstream masterwork-warm, angry, brilliant, wise, and laugh-out-loud funny. As was Joanna herself. I urge you to read it with all appropriate emotions." -Michael Swanwick, author of The Iron Dragon's Daughter

"The Feminist Press's new edition of Joanna Russ's realist lesbian novel On Strike Against God-a creatively significant but underappreciated piece in Russ's oeuvre-productively nests the original story within a well-curated selection of essays (including two by Russ herself!), interviews, correspondence, and other archival documents. These additions provide richly illustrated context for On Strike Against God, as well as Russ's broader 'transhistorical and multi-genre appeal,' which should delight both familiar and fresh readers." -Lee Mandelo, author of Summer Sons

"On Strike Against God is not only a long-overlooked essential work of feminist and lesbian awakening-told in Joanna Russ's inimitable mix of wild humor, acid commentary, and fierce humanity-but also a vulnerable reflection on her own coming-out experience. I know of few novels that are as tender, radical, and wonderful as this one." - Nicole Rudick, editor of Joanna Russ: Novels & Stories

"Fearless, funny, and quirkily honest about homophobia, lesbian desire, and being a decent human being upon whom much patriarchal stupidity is unloaded. On Strike Against God is a brilliant novel, and so remarkably prescient. It confirms without a doubt the importance of Joanna Russ as both an ancestor and a compatriot. This edition provides an insightful introduction by Alec Pollak and essays by Jeanne Thornton and Mary Anne Mohanraj which locate Russ in her time, assert their own presents, and show us how profoundly relevant Russ's work is to theirs. The interview between Alec Pollak and Samuel R. Delany gives us the necessary connections we need to understand how writers and communities can and must evolve their thinking and social orientations in order to draw into the present the true power our forebears have bequeathed us. I laughed, I sympathized, and I was deeply moved." -Larissa Lai, author of The Tiger Flu

"An invaluable edition of Joanna Russ's iconic work of queer rage and self-making. Students of Russ's work will rejoice in these excellent essays and contextual materials that illuminate Russ's life and political concerns. This is a rich scholarly resource and celebration of one of the twentieth century's great literary rebels." -Annalee Newitz, author of Stories Are Weapons

"This novel is fluoric acid: it cuts through everything. It's a magnifying glass, the kind that illuminates but also burns. It's a periscope, to be raised after diving into the wreck. It's a temporal portal, showing how isolating, frustrating, terrifying, gaslit, and unreal the experience of lesbian desire could feel in the 1970s. It's an underrated gem from a great and underrated writer better known for her transformative science fiction. And, before and after it is all those things, it's a power source, a validated rage, a lesbian coming-out story that shows how we need anger, we need love, we need to trust ourselves, we need to recognize patriarchy as a dominant lie, and we need-not just want or crave, but need-community: none of us can do it alone. Fortunately we have Joanna Russ and her legacies to help us. This novel stands among those legacies. Read it." -Stephanie Burt, author of We Are Mermaids

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