Across the Acheron
Monique Wittig
Across the Acheron
Translated by David Le Vay with Margaret Crosland
Introduction by Sophie Lewis
In her darkly funny 1985 take on Dante’s Divine Comedy, acclaimed French writer and activist Monique Wittig restages the journey through the circles of hell, limbo, and paradise from a lesbian feminist perspective.
Never-before published in the US, Across the Acheron follows the adventures of “Wittig” and her anti-Virgilian guide through laundromats, billiard parlors, dyke bars, and picnic grounds of a 1980s San Francisco populated by hunters and their prey, lost souls, and fantastical beasts, including a robotic eagle and angelic bikers. Wittig reimagines Dante’s epic poem through a feminist and queer lens, subverting his cosmological order and upending gender identities and literary traditions. This edition brings the English translation of Wittig’s final novel back into print for the first time since the early-1990s, revised according to the author's notes, and with a new introduction by Sophie Lewis.
“Even in fiction Monique Wittig’s writing is critical, prescient, brilliant, satirical, searing, and way ahead of its time. I’m so glad this work is back in circulation to revisit and revel in.”
—Pamela Sneed
Across the Acheron is a work of lesbian struggle and triumph across two kinds of hell. The hell of the classic western literary canon—and the hell of San Francisco. Monique Wittig brings all of her writerly powers and political experience to bear here, as witness to the horrors of heterosexual patriarchy and also to the possibility of another world for another life. Her work is a rare combination of deeply felt materialism and radical linguistic freedom. If we're to have another world, we'll need to create another language. She knew that, and she lived it.
—McKenzie Wark
In this unendurable yet compelling journey through the circles of patriarchal hell, Wittig encounters hordes of tortured women who do not struggle against their oppressors. Their brainwashing is as difficult to witness as their bloodied flesh. Only through communal activism does the seeker’s soul becomes tough enough to enter Paradise, where bare-breasted angels dismount motorcycles and offer baskets of “cherries, strawberries, raspberries, apricots, peaches, plums, tomatoes, avocadoes, green melons, cantaloupes, watermelons, lemons, pawpaws, pineapples, and coconuts.” The bounties of Across the Acheron are lush and many.
—Dodie Bellamy
A Guernica of the human (feminist) condition, a blacker, bleaker, more vengeful Alice’s tea party, this is a novel as graphic as a painting, whose brilliance its translators have creditably preserved.
—Publishers Weekly
Novelist, poet, theorist, and activist, Monique Wittig (1935–2003) burst onto the literary scene with her novel, The Opoponax, in 1964, which won the Medicis Prize and the attention of writers of the French New Wave. Her second novel, Les Guérillères, was written against the backdrop of the May 1968 student and worker revolt. In 1970, she co-founded the Women’s Liberation Movement (MLF) in France and penned its manifesto. Despite her activism, Wittig was sidelined from the MLF due to her resolute advocacy of lesbianism within materialist feminist discourse. In the mid-’70s, soon after publishing the formally radical The Lesbian Body, Wittig relocated to the United States with her partner, Sande Zeig, with whom she co-wrote Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary. Living in Northern California, she wrote the novel Across the Acheron, the political essays collected in The Straight Mind and Other Essays, a novella, a play, and two film scripts. She taught as a visiting professor at a variety of colleges, later joining the faculty of the University of Arizona. Widely published from the 1960s to the 1990s, her work is now animating a new wave of feminist and queer thought.
Sophie Lewis is a German-British writer and ex-academic feminist living in Philadelphia. She is the author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism against the Family and Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, both from Verso, and Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation from Haymarket Books. Her fourth book, The Liberation of Children, will be published by Penguin in 2027. Her articles and essays appear in peer-reviewed journals such as Feminist Theory and magazines like n+1.
David Le Vay (1915–2001) was a British surgeon, translator, and author of several biographies and popular science textbooks. He translated numerous scientific and literary works from French, German, Spanish, and Latin, including books by Monique Wittig, Joseph Roth, and Colette.
Margaret Crosland (1920–2017) was an English literary biographer and translator from French and Italian. She wrote biographies of figures such as Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean Cocteau, and translated works by Cocteau, Colette, the Marquis de Sade, Giorgio de Chirico, and Cesare Pavese, among others.
Paperback
152 Pages
5.12 x 7.95 inches
Edition of 3000
ISBN 978-1-959708-17-9
November 5, 2025
English
Distributed by Asterism Books (US/INTL) • Public Knowledge Books (UK)
Genre: Fiction
