A lost feminist masterwork returns
ON STRIKE AGAINST GOD by Joanna Russ, edited by Alec Pollak
About the book:
A lost feminist masterwork by a speculative fiction icon about a lesbian’s coming-to-consciousness during the social upheaval of the 1970s.
When Esther, an English professor living in 1970s small-town New York, has her first lesbian love affair, the fallout brings her everyday miseries into focus and sends her spiraling. Confronted with the homophobia of straight feminists and the misogyny of gay men, Esther is left to forge a language for her feminism and her burgeoning lesbian desire. A darkly comedic story of feminist love, hope, and reckoning, On Strike Against God’s call to readers —“Let’s be reasonable. Let’s demand the impossible”—rings urgently true today.
Originally published in 1980, On Strike Against God is the only realist novel by feminist science fiction icon Joanna Russ. This new critical edition includes previously unpublished alternate endings to the novel, letters between Joanna Russ and acclaimed poet Marilyn Hacker, and additional essays by Russ. Contemporary authors Jeanne Thornton and Mary Anne Mohanraj discuss Russ’s continued impact, and an interview with science fiction luminary Samuel R. Delany reflects on Delany’s decades-long friendship with Russ.
Praise for ON STRIKE AGAINST GOD:
“Vitriolic, vulnerable, polemical and devastatingly funny, Russ’s uncompromising tour de force bristles with trenchant truth-telling that will make it a life-changing encounter for many readers. Essential.” —Library Journal, starred review
“Remarkable.” —The Atlantic
“Russ’s prose glints with wit and sublimated rage… a fantastic introduction for those unfamiliar with the author, and a valuable addition to the collection of any Russ devotee.” —Publishers Weekly
“Eminently quotable.” —Reactor
“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
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Joanna Russ (February 22, 1937–April 29, 2011) was a Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author of feminist science fiction, fantasy, and literary criticism. Born in New York City, Russ graduated from Cornell University in 1957 and held teaching appointments in English and creative writing across the country until settling at the University of Washington in 1977. A historic, groundbreaking writer of feminist science fiction, she is best known for her novel The Female Man and now for her darkly funny survey of literary sexism, How to Suppress Women’s Writing.
ABOUT THE EDITOR:
Alec Pollak is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. Her research investigates how the decisions of literary estates, the management of archives, and the mechanics of intellectual property law have influenced the legacies of early- and mid-twentieth century authors. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (winner of the 2022 Katharine Newman Best Essay Award), Feminist Theory, the LA Review of Books, and the Yale Review. She is the winner of the 2018 Ursula Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship and the 2023 Hazel Rowley Prize for her work on a biography of feminist science fiction author Joanna Russ.
Alec has received fellowships and honors from Cornell University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University's Houghton Library, the New York Public Library, and Yale's Beinecke Library, among others. She will be a Junior Fellow at the Rare Books School's Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography beginning in 2023.
