Paperback Edition
ISBN: 9781558613140
Publication Date: 7-23-2024

Edited by Alec Pollak

When Esther, a recently divorced professor, has her first lesbian love affair, the fallout brings her everyday miseries into focus and precipitates a personal crisis. She flees her small upstate New York college town, grapples with gender confusion and the ghosts of therapists past, and fumbles her way through comedic sexual self-discovery, oscillating all the while 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 feminism and her burgeoning lesbian desire. On Strike Against God is quintessentially Joanna Russ: experimental but accessible, alternately wry and earnest, poignantly didactic, playful, and emotionally charged.

This new critical edition of On Strike Against God includes additional materials from Russ’s archive. An introduction by Russ scholar Alec Pollak opens the edition, and essays by contemporary writers Jeanne Thornton and Mary Anne Mohanraj grapple with Russ’s enduring influence on feminist authors today.

"A powerful, witty, revelatory meditation on culture and identity as only Russ could do it.” —Kameron Hurley, author of The Light Brigade

“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

“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 Mother

“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