July-August 2009
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.
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SHE HATED the work of Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and CarsonMcCullers (Clock Without Hands was “the worst book I’ve ever read”).The sort of book she gave close friends was Romano Guardini’s The Lord,or Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, or Teilhard de Chardin’sThe Phenomenon of Man.
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.
MoreON SEPTEMBER 22, 1975, Sara Jane Moore tried to kill Gerald Ford. It
was not Ford’s life that changed that day; he would go on, only a few
minutes off schedule, back to Washington. It was the man standing next
to Moore, Oliver Sipple, an overweight, 33-year-old gay man, who would
be changed forever by the assassination attempt.
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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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MoreIN 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.
More… Moz (as he’s known by his legion of queer-friendly fans) has found a reason to believe. And yet, in his newly released album, Years of Refusal, he sings that “only stone and steel accept my love.”
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