The Education of Harriet Hatfield


May Sarton - 1989
    And when the Boston Globe reports "Lesbian Bookstore Owner Threatened", her education in the narrow-mindedness of her fellow man—and woman—begins.

Calling Dr. Laura


Nicole J. Georges - 2013
    When she was twenty-three, a psychic told her he was alive. Her sister, saddled with guilt, admits that the psychic is right and that the whole family has conspired to keep him a secret. Sent into a tailspin about her identity, Nicole turns to radio talk-show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger for advice.Packed cover-to-cover with heartfelt and disarming black-and-white illustrations, Calling Dr. Laura tells the story of what happens to you when you are raised in a family of secrets, and what happens to your brain (and heart) when you learn the truth from an unlikely source. Part coming-of-age and part coming-out story, Calling Dr. Laura marks the arrival of an exciting and winning new voice in graphic literature.

Damn Love


Jasmine Beach-Ferrara - 2013
    Together, these stories report out from the fault lines of American life, uncertain territory where identity, risk, and desire co-mingle, and where reconciliation can be found in even the most flawed efforts to connect.

Women's Barracks


Tereska Torrès - 1950
    She arrived as a refugee in London and joined other exiles enlisting in Charles de Gaulle’s army, then stationed in Britain awaiting an invasion of their homeland by Allied forces. But Women’s Barracks is no ordinary war story.As the Blitz rains down over London, taboos are broken, affairs start and stop and hearts are won and lost. Women’s Barracks was banned for obscenity in several states. It was also denounced by the House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials in 1952 as an example of how the paperback industry was “promoting moral degeneracy.” But in spite of such efforts—or perhaps, in part, because of them—the novel became a record-breaking bestseller and inspired a whole new genre: lesbian pulp.From the obituary in the New York Times:Tereska Torrès, 92, Writer Of Lesbian Fiction, DiesTereska Torrès, a convent-educated French writer who quite by accident wrote America’s first lesbian pulp novel, died on Thursday at her home in Paris. She was 92……It was not homophobia that caused Ms. Torrès to find her book’s canonical status peculiar. Quite the contrary, she said: because affairs with barracks mates were so much a part of ordinary wartime experience the hoopla seemed simply prurient.“The book spoke very delicately about the few matters of sexual encounters,” Ms. Torrès told Salon.com in 2005. “But so what? I hadn’t invented anything — that’s the way women lived during the war in London.”She added: “I thought I had written a very innocent book. I thought, these Americans, they are easily shocked.”Femmes Fatales restores to print the best of women’s writing in the classic pulp genres of the mid-20th century. From mystery to hard-boiled noir to taboo lesbian romance, these rediscovered queens of pulp offer subversive perspectives on a turbulent era. Enjoy the series: Bedelia; The Blackbirder; Bunny Lake Is Missing; By Cecile; The G-String Murders; The Girls in 3-B; In a Lonely Place; Laura; Mother Finds a Body; Now, Voyager; Skyscraper; Stranger on Lesbos; Women's Barracks.

Begging for It


Alex Dimitrov - 2013
    A Bulgarian immigrant, Dimitrov writes as both observer of and fervent participant in this "American Youth," as his speakers navigate both the physical and emotional landscapes of desire, intimacy, and longing--whether for a friend, a lover, or a self, "Saint or stranger, I still recklessly seek you."

Les Guérillères


Monique Wittig - 1969
    Among the women’s most powerful weapons in their assault is laughter, but they also threaten literary and linguistic customs of the patriarchal order with bullets. In this breathtakingly rapid novel first published in 1969, Wittig animates a lesbian society that invites all women to join their fight, their circle, and their community. A path-breaking novel about creating and sustaining freedom, the book derives much of its energy from its vaunting of the female body as a resource for literary invention."A delectable epic of sex warfare . . . an extraordinary leap of the imagination into the politics of oppression and revolt." --Mary McCarthy

Kiss the Girls and Make Them Spy: An Original Jane Bond Parody


Mabel Maney - 2001
    Jane Bond."What's the story on Bond?""Your man is a homicidal depressive paranoiac," the doctor reported."I know that. I want to know what's wrong with him!And be straight with me, man. No medical mumbo jumbo.""He's lost his nerve."N. had suspected as much. After a long while spent staring at the jagged skyline of London, N. came to a decision. He had no other choice but to go through with Pumpernickel's ridiculous plan.Enter Bond, Jane Bond, James's lesbian twin sister and haoless bookstore employee, who steps in to masquerade as her brother at an awards ceremony with the queen. But when the dastardly Sons of Britain (S.O.B.s), a nefarious fraternity plotting to bring the Duke and Duchess of Windsor back to power, show up, it's up to some unexpected heros to save the day. The Powder Puff Girls -- makeup salespersons by day, secret agents by night -- step in to secure the future of Britain while Jane keeps her brother's reputation intact...both in and out of the bedroom!

Dream Work


Mary Oliver - 1986
    The depth and diversity of perceptual awareness-so steadfast and radiant in American Primitive-continue in Dream Work. Additionally, she has turned her attention in these poems to the solitary and difficult labors of the spirit-to accepting the truth about one's personal world, and to valuing the triumphs while transcending the failures of human relationships. Whether by way of inheritance-as in her poem about the Holocaust-or through a painful glimpse into the present-as in "Acid," a poem about an injured boy begging in the streets of Indonesia-the events and tendencies of history take on a new importance also. More deeply than in her previous volumes, the sensibility behind these poems has merged with the world. Mary Oliver's willingness to be joyful continues, deepened by self-awareness, by experience, and by choice.

Golden States


Michael Cunningham - 1984
    David Stark, an adolescent and mainstay of a family of women nearing physical or emotional collapse, hitchhikes from Southern California to San Francisco to locate a wandering sister and encounters adulthood.

La Bâtarde


Violette Leduc - 1964
    When first published, La Batarde earned Violette Leduc comparisons to Jean Genet for the frank depiction of her sexual escapades and immoral behavior. A confession that contains portraits of several famous French authors, this book is more than just a scintillating memoir. Like that of Henry Miller, Leduc's brilliant writing style and attention to language transform this autobiography into a work of art.Violette Leduc was born the illegitimate daughter of a servant girl and was encouraged to write by Maurice Sachs and Simone de Beauvoir. Her first novel, L'Asphyxie (In the Prison of Her Skin), was published by Camus for Gallimard and earned her praise from Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau, and Jean Genet. She went on to write eight more books, including Ravages, L'Affamee, and La Folie en tete (Mad in Pursuit), the second part of her literary autobiography.

The Collected Short Stories of Dorothy Parker


Dorothy Parker - 1942
    

Destiny: Valentine's on Emerald Mountain


Cara Malone - 2022
    Single and recently scorned, she’s dreading the next two weeks of couple’s massages, wine tastings and moonlight walks surrounded by people in love. Even the staff are hot and flirty… or maybe that’s just Haley’s heartache talking.But when a white-out catches Haley unprepared and underdressed, romance is the least of her worries.She’s disoriented and shivering when someone reaches through the storm and pulls her into an unoccupied cabin. As the blizzard rages outside, Haley meets her savior—the admirer she’d noticed before, a tall, dark and handsome woman named Destiny. And those sultry looks? Haley wasn’t imagining them.Des builds a fire in the hearth and kindles another in Haley’s core. Snowed in on Valentine’s Day, Haley can’t resist Cupid’s arrow—or Des herself. At least until the storm lets up.

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches


Audre Lorde - 1984
    These essays explore and illuminate the roots of Lorde's intellectual development and her deep-seated and longstanding concerns about ways of increasing empowerment among minority women writers and the absolute necessity to explicate the concept of difference—difference according to sex, race, and economic status. The title Sister Outsider finds its source in her poetry collection The Black Unicorn (1978). These poems and the essays in Sister Outsider stress Lorde's oft-stated theme of continuity, particularly of the geographical and intellectual link between Dahomey, Africa, and her emerging self.

Stone Butch Blues


Leslie Feinberg - 1993
    Stone Butch Blues traces a propulsive journey, powerfully evoking history and politics while portraying an extraordinary protagonist full of longing, vulnerability, and working-class grit. This once-underground classic takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride of gender transformation and exploration and ultimately speaks to the heart of anyone who has ever suffered or gloried in being different.

All My Mother's Lovers


Ilana Masad - 2020
    But when Maggie’s mom, Iris, dies in a car crash, Maggie returns home only to discover a withdrawn dad, an angry brother, and, along with Iris's will, five sealed envelopes, each addressed to a mysterious man she’s never heard of.In an effort to run from her own grief and discover the truth about Iris—who made no secret of her discomfort with her daughter's sexuality—Maggie embarks on a road trip, determined to hand-deliver the letters and find out what these men meant to her mother. Maggie quickly discovers Iris’s second, hidden life, which shatters everything Maggie thought she knew about her parents’ perfect relationship. What is she supposed to tell her father and brother? And how can she deal with her own relationship when her whole world is in freefall?Told over the course of a funeral and shiva, and written with enormous wit and warmth, All My Mother's Lovers is the exciting debut novel from fiction writer and book critic Ilana Masad. A unique meditation on the universality and particularity of family ties and grief, and a tender and biting portrait of sex, gender, and identity, All My Mother's Lovers challenges us to question the nature of fulfilling relationships.