Book picks similar to
The Ladies by Doris Grumbach
fiction
lgbt
historical-fiction
lesbian
Dearest Anne
Judith Katzir - 2006
The love between Michaela and Rivi is depicted precisely and delicately. . . . It’s beautiful.” —Amos Oz“More than anything else, the book is a temple of love to the imaginary, and to literature as an option for deep and vigorous living.” —
Time Out
Written by best-selling Israeli author Judith Katzir, Dearest Anne is a stirring record of an artist’s coming-of-age during the 1970s and the story of a hidden, erotic love affair between a teenaged girl and her married teacher, Michaela.After reading Anne Frank’s diary, young Rivi starts a series of writing notebooks that document the angst of growing up in rural Israel. The entries reveal how her crush on her literature teacher develops into a poignant and turbulent love affair that lasts for years before its scandalous end. Decades later, the grown Rivi, now a mother, wife, and established author, comes to terms with the forbidden love that shaped her life.
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Gertrude Stein - 1933
Toklas was written in 1933 by Gertrude Stein in the guise of an autobiography authored by Alice B. Toklas, who was her lover. It is a fascinating insight into the art scene in Paris as the couple were friends with Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. They begin the war years in England but return to France, volunteering for the American Fund for the French Wounded, driving around France, helping the wounded and homeless. After the war Gertrude has an argument with T. S. Eliot after he finds one of her writings inappropriate. They become friends with Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway. It was written to make money and was indeed a commercial success. However, it attracted criticism, especially from those who appeared in the book and didn't like the way they were depicted.
Backwards to Oregon
Jae - 2007
She accepted that she would spend her life alone when she chose to live her life disguised as a man. After working in a brothel for three years, Nora Macauley has lost all illusions about love. She no longer hopes for a man who will sweep her off her feet and take her away to begin a new, respectable life. But now they find themselves married and on the way to Oregon in a covered wagon, with two thousand miles ahead of them.
A Fairly Honourable Defeat
Iris Murdoch - 1970
As puppet master, Julius artfully plays on the human tendency to embrace drama and intrigue and to prefer the distraction of confrontations to the difficult effort of communicating openly and honestly.
Delayed Rays of a Star
Amanda Lee Koe - 2019
From Weimar Berlin to LA's Chinatown, from a seaside resort in East Germany to a luxury apartment on the Champs-Élysées, the different settings they inhabit are as richly textured as the roles they play: siren, muse, predator, or lover, each one a carefully calibrated performance. And in the orbit of each star live secondary players--a Chinese immigrant housemaid, a German soldier on leave from North Africa, a pompous Hollywood director--whose voices and viewpoints reveal the legacy each woman left in her own time, as well as in ours. Amanda Lee Koe's playful, wry prose guides the reader dexterously around murky questions of ego, persona, complicity, desire, and difference. Intimate and raw, Delayed Rays of a Star is a visceral depiction of womanhood--its particular hungers, its calculations, and its eventual betrayals--and announces a bold new literary voice.
Ascension
Jacqueline Koyanagi - 2013
When the desperate crew of a cargo vessel stops by her shipyard looking for her spiritually advanced sister Nova, Alana stows away. Maybe her boldness will land her a long-term gig on the crew. But the Tangled Axon proves to be more than star-watching and plasma coils. The chief engineer thinks he's a wolf. The pilot fades in and out of existence. The captain is all blond hair, boots, and ego . . . and Alana can't keep her eyes off her. But there's little time for romance: Nova's in danger and someone will do anything--even destroying planets--to get their hands on her.
Giovanni's Room
James Baldwin - 1956
In a 1950s Paris swarming with expatriates and characterized by dangerous liaisons and hidden violence, an American finds himself unable to repress his impulses, despite his determination to live the conventional life he envisions for himself. After meeting and proposing to a young woman, he falls into a lengthy affair with an Italian bartender and is confounded and tortured by his sexual identity as he oscillates between the two. Examining the mystery of love and passion in an intensely imagined narrative, Baldwin creates a moving and complex story of death and desire that is revelatory in its insight.
Afterimage
Helen Humphreys - 2000
Isabel is experimenting with the new medium of photography, and is inspired by Annie, who becomes her muse. The two form a close relationship, but when Eldon devises his own plans for the young maid, Annie nearly loses herself, until disaster reveals her power over the Dashells' work and hearts.
18th & Castro
Karin Kallmaker - 2006
...and it's a party like no other in the world. Welcome to the streets of the Castro, where the women aren't shy about what they want and how they'll get it. Crowds, costumes and parties - the apartment building at 18th & Castro is in the thick of it all.First-time couplings and couples who know how to mix lust and love make 18th & Castro the hottest address in the city by the bay.Take an erotic journey with Karin Kallmaker in this follow-up to the smash bestseller, All the Wrong Places. The award-winning Undisputed Mistress of Lesbian Romance demonstrates once again why "Mistress" is fitting as she invites, seduces and delights lesbians worldwide with her signature-brand of romantic erotica.
The Hours
Michael Cunningham - 1998
A young wife and mother, broiling in a suburb of 1940s Los Angeles, yearns to escape and read her precious copy of Mrs Dalloway. And Clarissa Vaughan steps out of her smart Greenwich village apartment in 1990s New York to buy flowers for a party she is hosting for a dying friend.The Hours recasts the classic story of Woolf's Mrs Dalloway in a startling new light. Moving effortlessly across the decades and between England and America, this exquisite novel intertwines the worlds of three unforgettable women.
Villains Don't Date Heroes!
Hayden Archer - 2014
The greatest villain Starlight City has ever known. The greatest supervillain the world has ever seen. She rules her city with an iron fist, and there are no new worlds to conquer. Needless to say life is pretty damn boring. All that changes when she decides to shake things up by robbing a bank the old fashioned way and runs into the city's newest hero: Fialux. Flying Fialux. Invulnerable Fialux. Super strong Fialux. Beautiful Fialux? Night Terror has a new archenemy who might just be able to defeat her, but even more terrifying are the confusing feelings this upstart heroine has ignited. She doesn't like heroes like that. She definitely doesn't like girls like that. Right? Only she can't deny the flutter she feels whenever she thinks of Starlight City's newest heroine! The line between hate and love is a razor's edge that the world's greatest villainess will have to walk if she wants to hold onto that title! Villains Don't Date Heroes! is a lesbian scifi romance novel that explores the world of villains, antiheroes, and heroes in a whole new way! This novel was previously published as Villainess Love. It's been completely rewritten with about 50% new content and is the first in a planned series following the misadventures of Night Terror and Fialux!
City Of Night
John Rechy - 1963
Bold and inventive in his account of the urban underworld of male prostitution, Rechy is equally unflinching in his portrayal of one hustling "Youngman" and his restless search for self-knowledge. As the narrator careens from El Paso to Times Square, from Pershing Square to the French Quarter, we get an unforgettable look at a neon-lit life on the edge. Said James Baldwin of the author, "Rechy is the most arresting young writer I've read in a very long time. His tone rings absolutely true, is absolutely his own; and he has the kind of discipline which allows him a rare and beautiful reckless."
Dancer
Colum McCann - 2003
Spanning four decades and many worlds, from the horrors of the Second World War to the wild abandon of New York in the eighties, Dancer is peopled by a large cast of characters, obscure and famous: doormen and shoemakers, nurses and translators, Margot Fonteyn, Eric Bruhn and John Lennon. And at the heart of the spectacle stands the artist himself, willful, lustful, and driven by a never-to-be-met need for perfection.
Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang
Joyce Carol Oates - 1993
The place is a blue-collar town in upstate New York, where five high school girls are joined in a gang dedicated to pride, power, and vengeance on a world they never made - a world that seems made to denigrate and destroy them. Foxfire is Joyce Carol Oates' strongest and most unsparing novel yet...an often engrossing, often shocking evocation of female rage, gallantry, and grit. Here, then, are the Foxfire chronicles - the secret history of a sisterhood of blood, a haven from a world of lechers and oppressors, marked by a liberating fury that burns too hot to last. It is the story of Maddy Monkey, who writes it...of Goldie, whose womanly body masks a fierce, explosive temper...of Lana, with her Marilyn Monroe hair and packs of Chesterfields...of timid Rita, whose humiliation leads to the first act of Foxfire revenge. Above all, it is the story of Legs Sadovsky, with her lean, on-the-edge, icy beauty, whose nerve, muscle, hate, and hurt make her the spark of Foxfire, its guiding spirit, its burning core. At once brutal and lyrical, this is a careening joyride of a novel - charged with outlaw energy and lit by intense emotion.The story moves over the years from the first eruption of adolescent anger at sexual abuse to a shared life financed by luring predatory men into traps baited with sex. But then the gang's very success leads to disaster - as Foxfire makes a last tragic stand against a society intent on swallowing it up. Yet amid scenes of violence, sexual abuse, exploitation, and vengeance lies this novel's greatest power: the exquisite, astonishing rendering of the bonds that link the girls of Foxfire together - especially that between Maddy, the teller ofthe tale, and Legs, whose quintessential strength and bedrock bravery make her one of the most vivid and vital heroines in modern fiction.
After the Fall
Robin Summers - 2011
She has three simple rules for life after the plague: Keep moving. Keep to yourself. Don’t get involved. The plague took a particular joy in killing the women of the world, making it that much harder for the few who survived. The only thing that matters since she escaped from a small farm outside of Pittsburgh is the truth waiting at the end of her journey home. The rest of the world, or what’s left of it, can go straight to Hell as far as she’s concerned.When a group of survivors offers her food and shelter, she is more than happy to spend a few days, take what she needs, and get out, like she always does. But in a place called Burninghead Farm, despite all her rules and plans, Taylor finds a group of people who have more to offer than the basics of survival. Most of all, there is Kate, a woman who makes Taylor realize love is still alive and makes her dream of a future she thought was no longer possible. If only Taylor can find the courage to fight for it.It turns out that the end of the world isn’t about the end of the world at all, but about what happens after.