On Strike against God

A new critical edition of the groundbreaking novella about a lesbian’s feminist awakening in the 1970s by feminist and speculative fiction icon, Joanna Russ.

Esther, a recently divorced academic, has her first lesbian love affair with graduate student Jean,  which brings her everyday miseries into focus and precipitates a personal crisis. She flees her small, upstate New York college town in search of reassurance, only to find  herself, as a lesbian, slipping through the cracks of the amalgam of movements that constituted  the “New Left” of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Esther grapples with her evergreen gender confusion and the ghosts of therapists past, fumbles through comedic sexual self-discovery, and oscillates between visionary confidence and debilitating self-doubt. Confronted with the homophobia of straight feminists and the misogyny of gay men, Esther is left to forge a language for her burgeoning lesbian desire and “demand the impossible” from herself, her lover, her loved ones, and her life. 

On Strike Against God is quintessentially Russ: experimental but eminently accessible, alternately wry and earnest, poignantly didactic, playful, and always emotionally charged. 

This new critical edition of Joanna Russ’s ground-breaking exploration of feminist and lesbian identity includes additional materials from Russ’s archives: an essay by Russ called “Not for Years but for Decades,” an alternate ending Russ considered for the book and letters to and from Marilyn Hacker about the alternate ending, along with an introduction by Russ scholar Alec Pollak, Samuel R. Delany’s reflections on his decades-long friendship and correspondence with Russ, and an essay by a contemporary writer about the impact of Russ’s work on contemporary fiction and feminist landscapes.