Across the Acheron

In her darkly funny 1985 take on Dante's Divine Comedy, acclaimed French writer and activist Monique Wittig restages the journey through the circles of hell, limbo, and paradise from a lesbian feminist perspective. Never-before published in the US, ACROSS THE ACHERON follows the adventures of "Wittig" and her anti-Virgilian guide through laundromats, billiard parlors, dyke bars, and picnic grounds of a 1980s San Francisco populated by hunters and their prey, lost souls, and fantastical beasts, including a robotic eagle and angelic bikers. Wittig reimagines Dante's epic poem through a feminist and queer lens, subverting his cosmological order and upending gender identities and literary traditions. This edition brings the English translation of Wittig's final novel back into print for the first time since the early-1990s, revised according to the author's notes, and with a new introduction by Sophie Lewis. || "ACROSS THE ACHERON is a work of lesbian struggle and triumph across two kinds of hell: the hell of the classic western literary canon, and the hell of San Francisco. Wittig brings all of her writerly powers and political experience to bear here, as witness to the horrors of heterosexual patriarchy and also to the possibility of another world for another life." --McKENZIE WARK || "Even in fiction Wittig's writing is critical, prescient, brilliant, satirical, searing, and way ahead of its time. I'm so glad this work is back in circulation to revisit and revel in." --PAMELA SNEED || "In this unendurable yet compelling journey through the circles of patriarchal hell, Wittig encounters hordes of tortured women who do not struggle against their oppressors. Their brainwashing is as difficult to witness as their bloodied flesh. Only through communal activism does the seeker's soul becomes tough enough to enter Paradise, where bare-breasted angels dismount motorcycles and offer baskets of 'cherries, strawberries, raspberries, apricots, peaches, plums, tomatoes, avocados, green melons, cantaloupes, watermelons, lemons, pawpaws, pineapples, and coconuts.' The bounties of ACROSS THE ACHERON are lush and many." --DODIE BELLAMY || Fiction. French Literature. Queer Studies. Gender Studies. LGBTQ+ Authors. Translation.