THIS VOLUME is actually a compilation of two previously published collections of short stories and a set of new ones by Jamaican-born writer Michelle Cliff, who has taught at various universities in the United States. These stories occupy an impressive range of settings and genres, from contemporary realism to historical and fantasy fiction.
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THE ACTRESSES Marlene Dietrich, Gloria Swanson, Joan Crawford, and Bette Davis, comedian Gracie Allen, Julia Childs, Queen Elizabeth I, and even two fictional characters, Endora (Agnus Moorehead) of Bewitched and Wonder Woman (Lynda Carter) are among the women who make it into My Diva, an anthology of short essays, each a few pages long, by writers and poets on the famous women who affected their lives.
MoreVANESSA & VIRGINIA is a short, imaginative novel of two sisters, Vanessa and Virginia Stephen, better known as the artist Vanessa Bell and the writer Virginia Woolf. Written from Vanessa’s perspective, it follows the two from childhood, depicting the tightly knit yet complex relationship between them through Virginia’s suicide in 1941 and into Vanessa’s old age.
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PERFORMER AND AUTHOR Staceyann Chin made her debut two months early, as she explains in this new memoir. Her mother, Hazel, who claimed that she didn’t know she was with child, gave birth on the floor of their small, rented house in Lottery, Jamaica, in her seventh month of pregnancy.
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IN LIGHT OF the myriad books about Bette Davis that are out there, one might question the need for another look at the grande dame of the big screen and her body of work. But author Peter McNally would rightly disagree, having written an exhaustive and even original book about the legendary actress’s most memorable turns.
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Reborn is a study of a complex women whose private life and secret self, including her sexual ambiguity, are at least as mesmerizing as her published works.
MorePIONEERING PHOTOGRAPHER, book publisher, and friend to a generation of artists and writers beginning in the 1890’s, F. Holland Day has not until recently received the respect he deserves. Scholarly essays and theses and a retrospective at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts in 2000 showed rising interest, but a new book finally does justice to Day’s achievement.
MoreEDWARD CARPENTER (1844-1929) was the most important early pioneer of gay liberation. Before him, writing in German, Heinrich Hössli had defended the “male love of the Greeks” (1836-38) and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs had decried the persecution of “male-male love” (1864-1880).
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LYDIA LOPOKOVA is not a name that comes to mind when one thinks of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, which is celebrating the 100th anniversary of its founding this year. Bloomsbury Ballerina, a superb new biography by British dance critic Judith Mackrell, should help remedy this situation.
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“I ONCE asked Christopher Isherwood if he’d mind if I kissed him,” begins an essay in Alfred Corn’s latest book, Atlas: Selected Essays, 1989-2007. With an opening line like that, what curious gay reader could resist reading further?
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