On Strike Against God

Completed in 1973 and first published in 1980, Russ’s brilliant autobiographical novella stands apart from and has been largely overshadowed by her influential science fiction. The Feminist Press restores this audacious, incendiary text in an impressively curated critical edition featuring complementary essays and alternate endings by Russ, supporting material from editor Alec Pollak and writers Jeanne Thornton and Mary Anne Mohanraj, an interview with author and critic Samuel R. Delany, and Russ’s correspondence with poet Marilyn Hacker. The rare woman English professor at a small college town in upstate New York, Esther is utterly disenchanted with an infantilizing patriarchy and its pretentious paragons in academia. Fired by her uneasy dawning affection for statuesque graduate student Jean, she comes into her own as “a something else,” rejecting the arbitrary confines of gender and the pathologization of lesbianism. Joy vies with sorrow, and mordant wit with moving candor, as she lets her guard down to discover that “there’s nothing so awful as being (coming) alive.”