One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter
reviewdate:
Jul 11 2017
isn:
9781683314141
Tagged with essays
Why Not Me
reviewdate:
Aug 24 2016
isn:
9780804138154
book type:
recommendation:
You'll Grow Out of It
reviewdate:
May 21 2016
isn:
9781455531189
book type:
recommendation:
Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness
reviewdate:
May 14 2016
isn:
9781593764722
book type:
recommendation:
Beyond Belief: The Secret Lives of Women in Extreme Religions
I'm interested in the topic and would probably read a full-length work on most of the authors' lives in extreme religions, but the short essay doesn't work. The cover is pretty, and a lot of the writing is good. And there are some good quotes. I like how Naomi J. Williams characterizes her parents' disgust with "church-hoppers," as "ecclesiastically promiscuous."
reviewdate:
Jan 1 2015
isn:
978-158005-442-3
author gender:
book type:
Something to Declare
Although I love Alvarez's novels, I found her book of essays to be a little meh. In fact, I stopped just before the halfway point. It might be zines' fault. I've read a lot of similar themed essays (about feeling half in one world and half in another, due to immigrant status, mixed race identity or the loss of one's native language) in dozens (hundreds?) of zines.
reviewdate:
Dec 27 2012
isn:
0-452-28067-2
author gender:
medium:
author demographic:
book type:
free:
Skin: Talking about Sex, Class & Literature
First of all I love that Allison published this 1994 collection of essays with Firebrand Books, a feminist and lesbian press, rather than a large publisher, which surely she could have, based on the success of Bastard out of Carolina, published by Dutton in 1992. Instead of using her success, even to have a better platform for her message to advance her career, she used it to advance her community, to give back to the press that gave her a platform in the first place, with her first book, Trash. (A chapbook of poetry preceded Trash.)
Quotations:
I use the word queer to mean more than lesbian. Since I first used it in 1980 I have always meant it to imply that I am not only a lesbian but a transgressive lesbian--femme, masochist, as sexually aggressive as the women I seek out, and as pornographic in my imagination and sexual activities as the heterosexual hegemony has ever believed. "A Question of Class." p. 23
I'd recognized in her face the same look I'd been seeing in other women's faces for all the months since the Barnard Conference on Sexuality (which my friends and I referred to as the Barnard Sex Scandal)--a look of fascination, contempt, and extreme discomfort. "Public Silence, Private Terror." p. 101-02
What will they think twenty years from now of the oral histories of the passing women on file at the Lesbian Herstory Archives? There's no doubt in my mind that the oral histories of working-class dykes and passing women will get far less serious consideration than those of famous artists and rich eccentrics. "A Personal History of Lesbian Porn." p.191 (a blog post of mine that touches on this)
reviewdate:
Mar 1 2009
isn:
1-56341-045-1