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 exposés 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.
Author Biography:
JOANNA RUSS (February 22, 1937 – April 29, 2011) was an American writer, academic, and feminist. She is the author of a number of works of science fiction, fantasy and feminist literary criticism such as How to Suppress Women's Writing, as well as a contemporary novel, On Strike Against God. She is best known for The Female Man, a novel combining utopian fiction and satire.
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.
