One of these days, readers are going to notice that lesbian fiction has moved far beyond the dour, correct, and clumsy scribblings that graced--or failed to grace--the lesbian-feminist journals of the '70s and '80s. In this fresh and impressive collection, Terry Wolverton and Robert Drake (editors of the recent His and Hers volumes) bring together writers as celebrated as Dorothy Allison and Carole Maso--neither of whom can be termed a "lesbian writer," if this suggests a small audience and a limited subject matter--with relative newcomers like Robin Podolsky and Cynthia Bond. Among the best stories (most of which were previously published within the last nine years) are A.M. de la Luz Montes' "R for Ricura," the tale of a delicious, necessary loss of innocence; "Larissa Lai's "When Fox Is a Thousand," a novel excerpt that draws on Chinese folklore; and Gerry Gomez Pearlberg's "Caravan," in which the partner of a famous woman describes the loneliness of loveless sex. There is also a companion volume, Circa 2000: Gay Fiction at the Millennium, of equally well written and moving work. --Regina Marler


Book Description
Lesbian writers find themselves at a crossroads as we enter the new millennium. Rich with the knowledge of its forebears, freed from the put upon shackles of recent decades, lesbian fiction is at a compelling point in history, surging into a new era, not as lesbian literature but as literature, period. It's time to take stock. Renowned authors and editors Terry Wolverton and Robert Drake have brought together the gifted voices of Dorothy Allison, Beth Brant, Rebecca Brown, Emma Donoghue, Larissa Lai, Achy Obejas, Gerry Gomez Pearlbert, and Sarah Schulman plus those of a host of talented newcomers to provide a cultural touchstone that not only illustrates the amazing metamorphosis of this important literary genre but provides a beacon to guide us into the future. The voices in this collection are informed by their experience, their love, their struggle, and their hope, not just as lesbians but as women and as members of the human community. The result is a chorale for our times and times to come.


About the Author
A creative writing instructor for nearly 20 years, Wolverton founded the acclaimed Perspectives Writing Progam at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center in 1988. Her novel Bailey's Beads was shortlisted for the ALA Award in 1997. Since 1986 Robert Drake has worked as a literary agent. His pop-culture novel The Man rapidly developed a cult following. The editors have worked together on the acclaimed His and Hers anthologies and have seven Lambda Literary Award nominations between them.

SYNOPSIS

Lesbian writers find themselves at a crossroads as we enter the new millennium. Rich with the knowledge of its forebears, freed from the put upon shackles of recent decades, lesbian fiction is at a compelling point in history, surging into a new era, not as lesbian literature but as literature, period. It's time to take stock. Renowned authors and editors Terry Wolverton and Robert Drake have brought together the gifted voices of Dorothy Allison, Beth Brant, Rebecca Brown, Emma Donoghue, Larissa Lai, Achy Obejas, Gerry Gomez Pearlbert, and Sarah Schulman plus those of a host of talented newcomers to provide a cultural touchstone that not only illustrates the amazing metamorphosis of this important literary genre but provides a beacon to guide us into the future. The voices in this collection are informed by their experience, their love, their struggle, and their hope, not just as lesbians but as women and as members of the human community. The result is a chorale for our times and times to come.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal

Wolverton and Drake, who have worked together on nine previous anthologies, take stock of lesbian publishing at the millennium in this, their final collaboration. Pieces by Sarah Schulman, Shani Mootoo, and Cynthia Bond are successfully excerpted from novels; others, like Larissa Lai's, have shifting points of view and multiple characters that are too complex for the short story format. Established writers Dorothy Allison, Achy Obejas, Rebecca Brown, Ana Castillo, Beth Brant, and Mary Gaitskill are represented as well. Emma Donoghue, always a treat, brings lesbian history alive with her fictionalization of the story of a couple of anti-vivisectionists in 1880s London. Editor Wolverton contributes a story in which a writing teacher reluctantly realizes that what she had thought was an impossibly complex breakup can actually fit into a narrative structure and that she, like a fictional character, must play only a limited role in her students' lives. Well-stocked fiction collections with have many of these pieces in anthologies or novels. The likeliness of redundancy makes this an optional purchase.--Ina Rimpau, Newark P.L., NJ Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

ACCREDITATION

A creative writing instructor for nearly 20 years, Terry Wolverton founded the acclaimed Perspectives Writing Progam at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center in 1988. Her novel Bailey's Beads was shortlisted for the ALA Award in 1997.

Since 1986 Robert Drake has worked as a literary agent. His pop-culture novel The Man rapidly developed a cult following.

The editors have worked together on the acclaimed His and Hers anthologies and have seven Lambda Literary Award nominations between them.

CONTRIBUTORS:

Dorothy Allison is the author of Trash, The Women Who Hate Me, Skin: Essays on Sex, Class, and Literature, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, and Bastard Out of Carolina, the acclaimed bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Award, and Cavedweller, for which she recently won the 1998 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction.

Cynthia Bond is an artist, activist, and author. She is working on her first novel, Ruby, an excerpt of which was critically praised when it appeared in the anthology, Afrekete. She has also edited an anthology of writing by gay and lesbian youth, When the Bough Breaks. She works as director of the Pedro Zamora Youth HIV Clinic at the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center.

Beth Brant is a Bay of Quinte Mohawk from Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory in Ontario. She is the editor of A Gathering of Spirit, and author of Mohawk Trail, Food & Spirits, and Writing as Witness. The past recipient of an Ontario Arts Council Award, a Canada Council grant, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, she is currently working on Testimony From the Faithful, a collection of essays about land and spirit. She lives in Michigan.

Ana Castillo, poet/novelist/artist/xicanista, lives in her hometown of Chicago with her son. Her last project, Goddess of the Americas/La Diosa de las Americas, was published by Riverhead Books in October 1996. She recently finished a novel, Peel My Love Like an Onion (Doubleday, forthcoming 1999) and a collection of poetry I Ask the Impossible. Widely anthologized, she has also written for newspaper and magazines across the country on various topics including the murder of Tejano singer, Selena, and most recently on gender roles in the Farmworkers movement (Los Angeles Times, 4/20/97). Castillo received an American Book Award for her first novel The Mixquiahuala Letters.

Elise D'Haene's fiction has appeared in several anthologies and journals including Hers and Hers 2 (Faber & Faber), edited by Terry Wolverton and Robert Drake, 1999 Best American Erotica (Simon & Schuster), edited by Susie Bright, and The Mammoth Book Of Lesbian Short Stories (Carroll & Graf), edited by Emma Donoghue. Her first novel, Licking Our Wounds (Permanent Press) won the Best Gay and Lesbian Fiction Award at BookExpo America Small Press Awards, Chicago, 1998. She lives in Los Angeles and New York with her lover, Celeste, and their dog, Alf.

Emma Donoghue Born in Dublin, 1969, Emma Donoghue is an Irish writer who lives in Canada. She has published novels (Stir-Fry, Hood), fairytales (Kissing the Witch), drama (Ladies and Gentlemen), lesbian history (Passions Between Women, We Are Michael Field), and anthologies (Poems Between Women, The Mammoth Book of Lesbian Short Stories). 'The Fox on the Line' is one of a series of fact-based historical fictions," Donoghue says. 'The Irish journalist Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904)-'F￯﾿ﾽ' to her loved ones-and the Welsh sculptor Mary Charlotte Lloyd met in 1860 in Rome, and lived together in London from 1863. After the passing of the watered-down Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876, Cobbe and Lloyd campaigned not for reform but for a total ban on live animal testing—a cause yet to be won. In 1884 they retired to Wales. When Mary Lloyd died in 1898, her will forbade Cobbe to 'commemorate her by any written record'." Emma Donoghue's vision of lesbian writing in the twenty-first century is that lesbians will write about anything, and anyone will write about lesbians, thus making the business of defining and anthologizing more delightfully impossible than ever.

Mary Gaitskill is the author of Bad Behavior; Two Girls, Fat and Thin; and Because They Wanted To. She lives in upstate New York.

Larissa Lai was born in La Jolla, California. She is currently based in Vancouver, British Columbia, where she works as a community organizer, writer and critic. In 1995, was the recipient of an Astraea Foundation Emerging Writers Award. Her novel, When Fox is a Thousand (Press Gang Publishers, 1995), was nominated for the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award in 1996. She recently spend an academic year as Canadian Writer-in-Residence with the Markin-Flanagan Distinguished Writers Programmer at the University of Calgary. Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in numerous journals including Bamboo Ridge, West Coast Line, The Asian American Journal, CV2, Matrix, Room of One's Own, Estuaire, and absinthe; as well as several anthologies including Many-Mouthed Birds, Pearls of Passion, Bringing It Home: Women Talk about Feminism in Their Lives, Eye Wuz Here and Into the Fire: Asian American Prose. Her articles and essays have appeared in Kinesis, Fuse, Harbour, Rungh, Video re/View: The (best) Source for Critical Writings on Canadian Artists' Video, Canadian Literature, as well as several exhibition catalogs. She is working on her second novel, Salt Fish.

Carole Maso is the author of Ghost Dance, The Art Lover, Ava. The American Woman in the Chinese Hat, and Aureole. She teaches at Brown University.

Amelia Maria de la Luz Montes teaches literature at the University of California at Santa Barbara in the departments of Chicano and Women's Studies. Her credits include poetry and short stories in UCLA Voices, Saguaro and Hers 3 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). She is a Xicana writer and native of Los Angeles. Of her story she writes, "'R for Ricura' was inspired by Ana Castillo's essay, 'La Macha: Toward an Erotic Whole Self' (Massacre of the Dreamers) in which Castillo argues for a woman's right to her own desires. Ricura lives in a world where fluidity in sexual identity is not an issue. I value Ricura's integrity-her willingness to explore sexuality and authority on her own terms."

Shani Mootoo was born in Ireland and grew up in Trinidad. A filmmaker, videomaker, and visual artist, her paintings and photo-based works are exhibited internationally. She is also a published poet and the author of Cereus Blooms At Night, a novel, and Out on Main Street, a collection of stories. She is working on her second novel.

Mei Ng is the author of Eating Chinese Food Naked (Scribner, 1998). She was born in New York City and currently lives in Brooklyn.

Achy Obejas is the author of We Came All the Way From Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? (1994), a collection of short stories, and Memory Mambo, (1996), a novel, both published by Cleis Press. She was born in Havana, Cuba.

Gerry Gomez Pearlberg is the author of Marianne Faithfull's Cigarette (Cleis) and the editor of Queer Dog: Homo/Pup/Poetry (Cleis), winner of a 1998 Firecracker Alternative Book Award.

Robin Podolsky is a writer who lives and works in Los Angeles. Her first book, tentatively titled Queer Cosmopolis, is forthcoming from New York University Press. Of this story, she says, "As a child, I would cry over The Twelve Dancing Princesses. Did the oldest sister betray her sisters on purpose? How could they forgive her if she did? What if the princesses didn't want to get married, and so on. My vehement reactions to the stories I read and viewed helped to push me toward writing. I like reclaiming and retelling popular myths to serve queer purposes--it's not as though someone can point to what "really" happened. I believe that myths and folk stories will serve to see us into the next century, so long as we're honest with ourselves about identity as artifact and we're not afraid to change."

Patricia Powell is the author of Me Dying Trial, A Small Gathering of Bones, and most recently The Pagoda, which won the Ferro-Grumley Prize for Best Lesbian Fiction. Powell is a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in fiction at Harvard University.

Sarah Schulman is the author of seven novels: Shimmer (Avon, 1998); Rat Bohemia (Dutton, 1995)--winner Ferro/Grumley prize for Lesbian Fiction, Finalist Prix de Rome; Empathy (Dutton, 1992); People in Trouble (Dutton, 1990)--Gregory Kolovakos Memorial Prize for AIDS Fiction; After Delores (Dutton, 1988)--American Library Association Gay/Lesbian Fiction Prize; Girls, Visions and Everything (Seal, 1986); The Sophie Horowitz Story (Naiad, 1984); and two nonfiction books, My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan/Bush Years (Routledge, 1994)--Gustavus Meyer Prize for a Work Promoting Tolerance, and Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS and the Marketing of Gay America (Duke, 1999)--American Library Association Gay/Lesbian Nonfiction Prize.

Jane Thurmond writes fiction and works as a graphic designer in Austin, Tex. Her short stories have appeared in various publications including The Iowa Review, The Austin Chronicle, Hers Volumes 1 and 3, and Indivisible.

Terry Wolverton is the author of Bailey's Beads, a novel, and two collections of poetry: Black Slip and Mystery Bruise. Her fiction, poetry, essays and dramatic texts have appeared in numerous literary publications including ZYZZYVA, Calyx, and Glimmer Train Stories, and been widely anthologized. She has also edited several acclaimed literary compilations, including Blood Whispers: L.A. Writers on AIDS, and with Robert Drake, Indivisible: New Short Fiction by West Coast Gay and Lesbian Writers, and the Lambda Literary Award-winning series His: Brilliant New Fiction by Gay Men and Hers: Brilliant New Fiction by Lesbians. Since 1976, Terry has lived in Los Angeles, where she's been active in the feminist, gay and lesbian, and art communities. In 1997 she founded Writers At Work, a center for writing workshops and individual creative consultations. She is currently at work on two books: Embers, a novel in poems, and Insurgent Muse, a memoir to be published by City Lights Publishers.