Greetings from Amazon.com Delivers Lesbian Studies FEATURED IN THIS E-MAIL: * "Strange Sisters: The Art of Lesbian Pulp Fiction 1949-1969," by Jaye Zimet * "Hers 3," edited by Terry Wolverton with Robert Drake * "Dear Juliette: Letters of May Sarton to Juliette Huxley," edited by Susan Sherman * "Queer in Russia," by Laurie Essig * "Tipping the Velvet," by Sarah Waters "Strange Sisters: The Art of Lesbian Pulp Fiction 1949-1969" by Jaye Zimet http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140284028/entertainmentsit Do you walk alone, a twilight lover? Odd one out? Warped? Troubled? Twisted? Jaye Zimet, a Brooklyn book designer and collector, has brought together over 200 sleazily appealing book covers from the boom years of the lesbian pulp novel, arranging them in groups from "Positive Portraits" and more ambitious "Cliterature" to "Psycho-Babble" and an entire section devoted to cleavage. Although large numbers of their original readers in the '50s and '60s were lesbians or protolesbians hoping for a glimpse of themselves or for some tenuous connection to an almost mythical community of "unnatural lovers," the covers of these books were clearly targeted to a primary audience of furtive young men. Scantily clad, buxom blondes simper under the gaze of older, "experienced" brunettes sometimes wearing trousers or short hair but never without lipstick. To the eye of Ann Bannon and her contemporaries, these women seemed as "straight as a pine tree." But "despite the almost comical distance between the covers and the contents," as Bannon concludes in her foreword, "the books found both their intended audiences.... If there was a solitary woman on the cover, provocatively dressed, and the title conveyed her rejection by society or her self-loathing, it was a lesbian book." "Hers 3" edited by Terry Wolverton with Robert Drake http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0571199623/entertainmentsit Amidst an outbreak of great new anthologies, including its companion volume of gay short fiction, "Hers 3" more than holds its own, from the nearly flawless opening story by Pat Schatz, in which a young woman rides the Tokyo subway in rush hour for the thrill of bodies pressed against her, pushed in tightly by the white-gloved conductor, to Ellen Hawley's painstakingly realistic account of the night her protagonist's niece was beaten by her boyfriend, to Carrelin Brook's dreamy but precise evocation of otherness in "The Butcher's Wife." A few well-known writers are included, such as Donna Allegra, Barbara Wilson, the art critic Catherine Lord, and Emma Donoghue (who edited the recent "Mammoth Book of Lesbian Short Stories"), but most are newer voices. Readers who haven't noticed the astonishing improvement in lesbian fiction in the past five years would do well to indulge themselves with this latest volume in the "Hers" series. Have you read "The Mammoth Book of Lesbian Short Stories" yet? http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0786706279/entertainmentsit "Dear Juliette: Letters of May Sarton to Juliette Huxley" edited by Susan Sherman http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393047334/entertainmentsit The poet May Sarton's reputation took a nosedive after her death in 1995 and the unflattering biography by Margot Peters that followed. The publication of her tender, revealing letters has managed to arrest this decline. Susan Sherman, who edited Sarton's "Selected Letters, 1916-1954," now offers insight into Sarton's most profound and affecting romance, with Juliette Huxley, the Swiss-born wife of the English scientist Sir Julian Huxley. May and Juliette met in 1936, while May was involved with Julian. Their love affair culminated in one passionate week in Paris in 1948, after which--hurt by May's angry threat that she would tell Julian--Juliette broke off the relationship. After Julian Huxley's death in 1976, they began to write one another again, and kept in contact until Juliette's death. As May Sarton wrote in old age, "I have had many lovers, many friends since I was 25 and met Juliette Huxley, but none has so nourished the poet and the lover as she did, the incomparable one." With drafts of introductions by May Sarton, and excerpts from a few of Juliette Huxley's responses to Sarton. "Queer in Russia" by Laurie Essig http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/082232346X/entertainmentsit This engrossing and highly readable sociological study of queer life in present-day Russia will disturb readers who hoped or assumed that President Yeltsin's 1993 decriminalization of consensual sex between adults of the same sex would unlock the Iron Closet. Since 1917, homosexuality has officially existed in Russia only as a legal or medical category, either a criminal act or an illness. Russian men and women who experience same-sex desire have so internalized the various proscriptions of society and the law that they are hardly rushing to proclaim themselves gay, Essig found, let alone unfurl the rainbow flag. Many are happier viewing themselves as transsexuals-- simply born into the wrong bodies--than as violators of Russia's rigidly gendered behavioral codes, and others are too strongly nationalistic to embrace what is widely considered a Western liberation movement. Incidentally, Essig discloses both an exquisitely lyrical Russian alternative to the term "queer"--"people of the moonlight"-- and a creepy clinical designation for lesbianism--"sluggishly manifesting schizophrenia"--a phrase that (happily) has no equivalent outside the former Soviet Union. "Tipping the Velvet" by Sarah Waters http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1573221368/entertainmentsit The heroine of Sarah Waters's audacious first novel knows her destiny, and seems content with it. Her place is in her father's seaside restaurant, shucking shellfish and stirring soup, singing all the while. "Although I didn't long believe the story told to me by Mother--that they had found me as a baby in an oyster-shell, and a greedy customer had almost eaten me for lunch--for eighteen years I never doubted my own oysterish sympathies, never looked far beyond my father's kitchen for occupation, or for love." At night Nancy Astley often ventures to the nearby music hall, and the moment she spies a new male impersonator--still something of a curiosity in England circa 1888--her years of innocence come to an end and a life of transformations begins. "Tipping the Velvet" is so entertaining that, even though the book contains nearly 500 pages, readers will wish Nancy's sentimental--and hedonistic--education had taken twice as long. ****** You'll find more great books, articles, and interviews in Amazon.com's Gay & Lesbian section at Books
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