Barnard is expanding its lesbian fiction collection (let me know if you want a copy of the article) to include lesbian genre fiction. Please share favorite titles, authors, series, publishers and awards to make my collection development work easier.
This is one of the best literary novels I’ve read in recent memory. I’ve been too mentally fatigued to enjoy much but genre fiction lately. Lucky Third Girl is both an easy and satisfying read. It tells the story of three generations of African-American women: a woman scarred by a 1921 race riot in Tulsa, her daughter who went to Hollywood to be a movie star and instead became a Playboy bunny and blaxploitation bit player in the 1970s, and then her daughter, who aspire to be a filmmaker in present day New York.
This is such a Rivington Street readalike that it’s hard not to compare the two. Both begin in Russia around the turn of the 20th century and move to the Lower East Side after a pogrom. Both are about young Jewish female union workers and both have lesbian characters, and both depict the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.
“You sound like a capitalist, all excited about machinery,” I said. “Aren’t you afraid that [linotype] will put printers out of work?”
“I was, but now I understand that the more books and pamphlets there are, the more men will read.” He dropped his voice. “And with this machine, we can make up our own pamphlets when the boss is out and melt the evidence before he comes back.” He leaned back in the sunlight, very pleased with himself.
The Williamsburg Bridge was its own sin. Its construction, Lena told me, made hundreds of people homeless when their buildings were torn down. A little like pogrom of progress, burning anything in its path, making Jews take to the roads with everything they owned on their backs, or move in with their relatives and landslayt, crowding more than we were ever crowded in Kishinev.
I've really got to stop reading graphic novel comics (and tween novels) when more often than not my review starts with a disclaimer that it's not my genre. I was drawn to read the Batwoman story because the Twitterdome was full of "DC's first gay superhero" buzz. It's true that comics don't speak to me the way I think they should, but sometimes they really really do--like if they're written/drawn by Lynda Barry or Alison Bechdel, so I keep trying. However, lesbian though she may be, Batwoman Kate Kane is no dyke to watch out for, not that she isn't scary. She's a soldier manquée (DADT) with a vicious grudge. Speaking of DADT, I should mention here that Dan Choi served as a consultant for the book. You also might want to know that Rachel Maddow wrote the intro.
