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(I wrote the original version of this post in 2018; in 2025, I heavily revised it.)

I’ve now read all of Joanna Russ’s fiction (published and un-), and nearly all of her published nonfiction. A couple of people who haven’t read her work have recently asked me for recommendations for starting points, so here’s an attempt to provide some. As with my Delany-starting-points post from last year, I’m dividing this into categories, depending on what you’re interested in.

Most of Russ’s novels are now available as ebooks, as is her best-known nonfiction book. Her short fiction, alas, is mostly not yet available in ebook form, and is mostly out of print; but most of it can be found in used copies from online used-book sellers.

Content warning: All of Russ’s work can be oblique and painful. It can be hard to read both in the sense that it’s not always clear what’s going on if you don’t pay close attention, and in the sense that it can result in emotional distress. There’s lots of difficult stuff in her writing, including portrayals of sexism and misogyny and other bad behavior by men, dubious-consent sex, sexual violence and threats thereof, sexualizing of girls, arguably Islamophobia, and more.

Also worth noting: Russ was a lesbian, but unfortunately most of her fiction doesn’t include lesbian characters. It includes quite a few heterosexual couples, and a few straight women who are interested in a gay man, and a few stories featuring some lesbian subtext, but not many women who are overtly interested in/involved with other women. I mention this primarily to set your expectations, so you won’t expect the women to end up as couples in most of her work. (If you do want overtly lesbian characters, see On Strike Against God, below.)

In case you're in a hurry, I'll start by saying that the short version of my recommendation is: Start with the Library of America book Joanna Russ: Novels & Stories, which is available only on paper, not as an ebook.

I feel like I should add a disclaimer: A lot of Russ’s work is specifically about being a (white) woman in the US in the 1960s and 1970s. I am not part of the core audience for much of her work, and so my opinions about what makes a good starting point may be even less widely applicable than is usually the case when anyone makes recommendations.

Short stories

I’m a short-story fan, so of course I’m going to recommend starting with Russ’s short fiction.

Some specific suggestions:

Joanna Russ: Novels & Stories (Library of America)

This volume includes both novels and short stories. But among the short stories included in the book are all six Alyx pieces (five stories and a short novel; see below) and “When It Changed” (see below). So it’s a good starting point whether you prefer short fiction or novels. Unfortunately, for Reasons, it’s not currently available as an ebook, only as a paper book.

The Adventures of Alyx

This book collects all of Russ’s fiction about her character Alyx (except for one short story): four novelettes and a short novel. Three of the novelettes are sword-and-sorcery, which doesn’t normally do much for me, but I like the first two of these quite a bit. And then there’s the novel, Picnic on Paradise, which suddenly yanks Alyx out of her home milieu and into the far future, where she has to help a group of more or less helpless future people survive an inhospitable trek through a snowy wilderness. And then there’s the last of the novelettes, “The Second Inquisition,” which is a sort of a sequel to Picnic on Paradise, and is my favorite of the Alyx-related works. I used to highly recommend this collection as a starting point, but now the LoA volume (see above) has the full contents of this book, plus the other Alyx story that didn’t appear in this book, plus other works. And this book also isn’t available as an ebook, so the only reason to prefer it over the LoA volume is if you can find this book at a lower price.

“When It Changed”

Probably Russ’s best known short story. Introduces Whileaway, a planet populated entirely by women; one of the best of the subgenre of fiction about single-sex societies. I assume that the PDF versions available online are illicit, so I’m not linking to them. But it’s been reprinted many times in paper books, and a couple of times in ebooks. It’s also included at the end of the new ebook of The Female Man (see below). And it’s in the LoA volume (see above).

The Hidden Side of the Moon

One of a few collections of Russ’s short fiction (not all of which is sf). A mixed bag; some of the stories are just jokes, but some of them are excellent. I especially recommend “Life in a Furniture Store,” “Visiting Day,” “Daddy’s Girl,” “The Autobiography of My Mother,” and most especially “The Little Dirty Girl.” But this book is probably not an ideal starting point.

Her other main collection, The Zanzibar Cat, is also worth reading but also a mixed bag; it wouldn’t be a bad starting point, but I would say the items above would be better. Also, Zanzibar Cat was published in two different editions with different contents, so you need both versions to see all of the stories collected under that title.

I have reason to hope that a complete-Russ-short-fiction ebook will be published at some point, but I don’t know when. And even when it is, a complete volume of her 60+ short fiction pieces may not be a great starting point.

I’ll say more about her other arguably-a-short-fiction-collection book, Extra(ordinary) People, below.

Novels

Depending on how you count, Russ wrote six or seven published novels. Six of them are now available as ebooks.

My recommendations for starting points:

Picnic on Paradise

This short novel is included in The Adventures of Alyx and the Library of America volume (see above), as well as being published as a standalone book. I think it would make a fine starting point, but I also think that reading at least a couple of the Alyx short stories before this gives a little more depth, a little more of a sense of who the character is. I would say this is probably the most accessible of Russ’s sf novels.

The Two of Them

This may be my favorite novel that I’ve read in the past couple years. It might not be ideal as a starting point, because it draws on some background established in Picnic on Paradise (it’s not a sequel, but it’s a related book), so I would recommend starting with the Alyx stories and then reading Picnic and then The Two of Them. But I think it would also work fine on its own, without your having read the earlier works. …I should add that reviews I’ve read of this book don’t praise it nearly as highly as I do; it’s clearly not to everyone’s taste. And it can be read as Islamophobic.

The Female Man

A groundbreaking and influential masterpiece. I very highly recommend reading this book; but it’s closely connected to “When It Changed” (though not exactly a sequel as such), and I would recommend reading that story before this novel. The usual description of The Female Man is that it’s about four women who are alternate-universe versions of each other, from very different milieus; but I feel like that description doesn’t do justice to the nuance and anger and brilliance of the book. This novel is available as an ebook (the ebook edition also includes “When It Changed”), and is included in the Library of America volume (see above).

On Strike Against God

This novel, unlike the others listed above, is non-speculative; it’s more or less a lesbian love story. I like it a lot, and I feel like it would make a fine starting point inasmuch as it’s pretty accessible and doesn’t have any overt connections to Russ’s other fiction; but that does mean that reading it won’t give you much of a sense of what Russ’s other fiction is like. This book is available as an ebook, and is also included in the LoA volume (see above).

I’m less fond of Russ’s other two best-known novels, And Chaos Died and We Who Are About To… (The latter is included in the LoA volume.) Both are interesting, but I feel like they don’t work as well as the above-listed books, and are less accessible to newcomers to Russ’s work. But We Who Are About To… was influential and provocative.

Russ also wrote a Middle Grade novella called Kittatinny: A Tale of Magic, which she described as being for children of all ages; to me, it reads as a sort of fairy-tale coming-of-age story.

And she considered her book Extra(ordinary) People to be a novel; I consider it to be a collection of unrelated short stories tied together very loosely with a framing device, but I feel like it’s worth considering the author’s wishes in deciding what to label a given work. Whether or not it’s a novel, I like Extra(ordinary) People, but I wouldn’t particularly recommend it as a starting point. But worth noting that the opening novella, “Souls,” won Russ her only Hugo award. (And that story is included in the Library of America volume.)

Nonfiction

Russ was a prolific writer of essays and reviews. I think probably the best starting point for her nonfiction is her justly-acclaimed book How to Suppress Women’s Writing, which is available in both print and ebook forms.

But there are also other options. For example:

Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts

A brief collection of feminist essays by Russ, most of them related to sexual fantasies and pornography. Includes Russ’s autobiographical essay about figuring out that she was a lesbian (“Not for Years, but for Decades”), Russ’s influential discussion of Star Trek slash fiction (“Pornography by Women for Women, with Love”), and four other essays. I’m biased toward this one, because I published it as an ebook. But I feel like it would make a fine starting point.

The Country You Have Never Seen: Essays and Reviews

If you like reading book reviews, then this might be a good starting point; this collection includes a lot of them (written by Russ). Even if you’re not generally a fan of reviews, this might be worth reading; but in that case, I might not recommend it as a starting point. It exists only on paper; not (yet) as an ebook.