What happened to our new Roaring '20s?
CNN
With one year coming to an end and another one before us, we're looking back at some of the top social commentary and cultural criticism that helped us look hard into the darkness and bridge the gaps between us, writes Jane Greenway Carr.
So says one of the characters in Djuna Barnes's 1936 modernist novel "Nightwood," set in the 1920s and defined by the intense grief, alienation and passion of its characters. It's the disjointed tale of exiles seeking a place to belong and characters who talk past one another. The words they speak to each other are both emotionally horrifying and wickedly funny; without being obvious about it, Barnes uses them to question the possibility of a common language for reality, for what human beings desire -- and to challenge what makes us human at all.