Fiction
Michelle Tea's Rose of No Man's Land features Trisha Driscoll, a bright fourteen-year-old living in small town suburbia. While Trisha tries to figure out her summer plans, her sister Kim is filming her audition tape for MTV's The Real World ("She's positive she can be the teenaged-hairdresser-from-an-impoverished-New-England-town character"), her mother is a hypochondriac who never leaves the couch and can't decide whether she has autism or breast cancer, and her mother's live-in boyfriend, Don, hides stolen material in Trisha's bedroom and is fond of declaring "If I had tits I'd stay home and play with them all day."
The real drama ensues when Trisha is hired and fired within the same day from the trendy clothing store Omigod! and meets up with her new friend Rose. The night begins with speed and ends with hitchhiking, tampons, naked Polariod pictures, Astroturf, a dirty Chinese restaurant, sex ("her warm breath blew into me like weather and I felt like mush, like a ruined planet"), tattoos, cops and fireballs. The pace is fast, the voice engaging, and the writing razor-sharp.
On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the AIDS crises, Julia Salazar's poignant novel, Natural Disasters, is a story about love, friendship and loss. Set in early 1990s Los Angeles, Jesse is a lesbian who works at an AIDS center called the Alliance. Though she is trained as a social worker to counsel everyone else, Jesse experiences her own series of tragedies. She suffers from mental and spiritual exhaustion from her work at the Alliance, her house is nearly destroyed in a mudslide, and her partner of ten years has an affair as they're about to celebrate their anniversary. But it is Jesse's friendship with Gabe, a gay man with HIV, that makes this book such a compelling read. Salazar's treatment of AIDS and grief-both as a communal and private experience-is tender and authentic.
Dorothy Strachey's Olivia captures first-time love with all the passion, jealousy and rejection it entails. Based on Strachey's experience as a student at a finishing school outside Paris , the slender novel maintains its tension as Olivia's feelings for headmistress Mlle. Julie go from admiration to adoration. Leonard Woolf published the book under Hogarth Press in 1949, fifteen years after it was written. It was immediately declared a masterpiece and banned by the Catholic Church. The book was recently re-released and is listed as one of the "100 Best Gay and Lesbian Novels of the 20th Century" by Publishing Triangle.
Patricia Highsmith's lesbian cult classic The Price of Salt has long been lauded by critics since it was first published in the early 1950s and helped inspire Vladmir Nobokov's Lolita. The book follows Therese Belivet, a young woman who works in a department store in Manhattan while trying to make it as a set designer. When Belivet meets Carol Aird, a mysterious and alluring woman who is married with a daughter, the two begin an intense love affair that is as passionate as it is destructive.
The book captures a different period of time but Highsmith's writing about sexual awakening is remarkably enduring. Though a portion of the book is based on Highsmith's life, she first published The Price of Salt under the pseudonym Claire Morgan to avoid the categorization of a "lesbian-book writer." As she says in her Afterword, "I like to avoid labels. It is American publishers who love them." Labels or not, don't miss this book.
Nonfiction
Terri Jentz's Strange Piece of Paradise is a true story about survival. In 1977, Jentz and her college roommate decided to spend the summer riding cross-country on their bikes. The first week into the journey they were attacked by a man with an axe as they slept in tents at an isolated campground in central Oregon. Both women survived (though Jentz's roommate does not remember the experience due to brain injuries) but the assailant was never identified or prosecuted.
Fifteen years later, Jentz begins to see how the vicious attack divided her life into "a before and after," and hindered her personal growth. The book fastidiously chronicles Jentz's experience returning to Oregon to investigate the crime and the impact it had on not only her life but the surrounding community. Jentz's writing is as compelling and gripping as her journey. The book also proves that a coming-of-age story is not limited to adolescence.
For a different take on an emotional voyage, pick up Tania Katan's hilarious and stirring memoir My One-Night Stand with Cancer. The title is ironic. Ten years after Katan beat breast cancer at twenty-one-years old, she was diagnosed yet again. In the book Katan moves deftly from the past to the present with snapshot vignettes that chronicle her experiences with cancer. Katan is candid and sincere when writing about the disease, her eccentric but devoted family, the difference between healthy girlfriends and "toxic" girlfriends, and her host of colorful friends. It's impossible not to admire her strength, courage and humor.
Poetry
Marilyn Hacker's Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons, follows the love affair between two women in a series of sonnets and villanelles. The book moves from "I will not go to bed with you because/ I want to very much" to "Your body is the text I need the art/ to be constructed by" to "Your breast, thighs, shoulders, mouth, voice, are the places/ I live, whether or not I live with you." It's a beautiful, sensual read.
Elizabeth Bishop's Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-box, Uncollected Poems, Drafts and Fragments, edited and annotated by Alice Quinn, is a worthwhile collection of unpublished material. The most interesting and revealing parts of the book include Bishop's many drafts and notes, which offer a glimpse into her inspired and lyrical mind.
Heather Aimee O'Neill's work has appeared in several literary journals. She is a co-director for the Speakeasy Poetry Series in New York City and teaches creative writing at CUNY Hunter College.
