LESBIAN STUDIES

To celebrate Pride Month, Amazon.com is proud to announce the launch of our Gay & Lesbian category page, where you can find a wide range of fiction and nonfiction titles that focus on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues and interests.

"To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done For America--A History"
by Lillian Faderman
Taking up where her 1981 classic, "Surpassing the Love of Men," left off, Lillian Faderman reveals that many of the early leaders who fought for women's suffrage, higher education for women, and women's entrance into "male" professions would in today's parlance be called lesbians: "women who lived in committed relationships with other women." Unencumbered by the duties of marriage and motherhood, they were more likely to have the time, energy, and freedom to work for women's rights. In fact, they were more or less obliged to try to better women's lives, Faderman argues, for there was no man to represent them at the polls or support them financially. (Although Elizabeth Cady Stanton's husband and seven children failed to distract her from the cause, her friend Susan B. Anthony used to help her with the children and housework before they settled down for political strategy meetings.) During the Depression, when women's social and economic gains began to dwindle, it was these "single" women who kept professions open while married women were being fired in favor of men. Faderman gracefully surveys a century of advancement and retreat, shedding light on America's debt to women-loving women. Read more

Our Price: $12.00 | You Save: $3.00 (20%)   

return to top
"Crocodile Soup"
by Julia Darling
Gert Hardcastle and her twin, Frank, can read each other's minds. She knows when he is plotting fiery ordeals for her dolls, and he knows when she is being attacked by river swans. When Frank returns from his sadistic boys school and moves into the ghost-infested attic bedroom that Gert has just fled, she is the sole family member to see the aura of madness collecting around him. But there are limits to their empathy. In adulthood, only she receives begging letters from their indigent mother, and only she is wracked by hopeless love for Eva, the coffee girl at the museum where she works as a curator. Frank remains strangely removed from human concerns, despite his telepathic link to his sister.

Well received by English critics, "Crocodile Soup" will call to mind Jeanette Winterson's early work, especially "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit," yet this fragmented but appealing comic novel is entirely fresh. Julia Darling has the gift of writing from a child's perspective: an ability to see at close range, and without context, making plain the strangeness and wonder of the world. The best chapter in the book is a brief description of the twins' first day of nursery school. Surveying the chubby boys racing wild-eyed around the room, Gert promptly wets her pants, while Frank begins to count maniacally. For the rest of the morning, she is ostracized, and sits in humiliation near the fuzzy felt while her brother, "still counting, drew a picture of an abattoir, upsetting some of the other children."

He had reached two thousand and eighty-three when Miss Lute rang a heavy brass bell, and we were instructed to eat rusks, which tasted of recently ironed tablecloths. We were told to chew them thoroughly. Then we had weak juice, that must have been drugged, because afterwards we all lay down on straw mats and fell asleep, while Miss Lute sang "The Farmer Wants a Wife" in a low monotone.
None of Darling's other characters come to life in the way that Gert and Frank do, not even Gert as an adult, with her inexplicable passion for Eva. Neither is narrative the driving force behind "Crocodile Soup," which ambles along with an internal logic that may frustrate a plot-loving reader. Nevertheless, the childhood scenes and Darling's comic talents make this a more-than-worthy debut from a quirky new voice in British fiction. Read more

Our Price: $17.50 | You Save: $7.50 (30%)   

return to top
"Tipping the Velvet"
by Sarah Waters
The heroine of Sarah Waters's audacious first novel knows her destiny, and seems content with it. Her place is in her father's seaside restaurant, shucking shellfish and stirring soup, singing all the while.
Although I didn't long believe the story told to me by Mother--that they had found me as a baby in an oyster-shell, and a greedy customer had almost eaten me for lunch--for eighteen years I never doubted my own oysterish sympathies, never looked far beyond my father's kitchen for occupation, or for love.
At night Nancy Astley often ventures to the nearby music hall--not that she has illusions of being more than an audience member. But the moment she spies a new male impersonator--still something of a curiosity in England circa 1888--her years of innocence come to an end and a life of transformations begins.

"Tipping the Velvet," all 472 pages of it, is as saucy, as tantalizing, and as touching as the narrator's first encounter with the seductive but shame-ridden Miss Kitty Butler. And at first even Nancy's family is thrilled with her gender-bending pal, all but her sister, best friend, and bedmate, Alice, "her eyes shining cold and dull, with starlight and suspicion." Not to worry. Soon Nancy and Kitty are off to London, their relationship close though (alas for our heroine) sisterly. We know that bliss will come, and it does, in an exceptionally charged moment. A lesser author would have been content to stop her story there, but Waters has much more in mind for her buttonholing heroine, and for us. In brief, her Everywoman with a sexual difference goes from success onstage to heartbreak to a stint as a male prostitute (necessity truly is the mother of invention) to keeping house for a brother and sister in the Labour movement. And did I mention her long stint as a plaything in the pleasure palace of a rich Sapphist? Diana Lethaby is as cruel as she is carnal, and even the well-concealed Cavendish Ladies' Club isn't outré enough for her. Kitting Nancy out in full, elegant drag, she dares the front desk to turn them away. "We are here," she mocks, "for the sake of the irregular."

Only after some seven years of hard twists and sensual turns does Nancy conclude that a life of sensation is not enough. Still, "Tipping the Velvet" is so entertaining that readers will wish her sentimental--and hedonistic--education had taken twice as long. Read more

Our Price: $11.16 | You Save: $2.79 (20%)   

return to top
"Summit Avenue"
by Mary Sharratt
Kathrin Albrecht's childhood in Germany at the turn of the century was so relentlessly grim that she endures the hardships of her new life in America--sewing flour bags for pennies, sharing a bed at a boarding house--without complaint. Eventually, she takes night classes in English. She begins to haunt secondhand bookshops, where she eventually catches the eye of a professor's widow, Violet Waverly, who turns out to be both the fairy godmother and the prince of this complex and subtle Cinderella tale. Mary Sharrat's debut has almost none of the typical faults of first novels. Her language is lush but controlled, her narrative carefully paced. Nothing is rushed or condensed. Recognizing the young woman's intelligence, and intrigued by her thirst for knowledge, Violet hires Kathrin for a few months' work translating and typing the German fairy tales that her dead husband had collected. She also offers her a room in her mansion on Summit Avenue. As she works, Kathrin enters the magical world of the fairy tales and of her beautiful new surroundings with the same breathless sense of surrender:
They become a part of me, layers and layers inside me. What I would take with me when I left this house was far more precious than the ability to type. The tales would become my secret treasure.... I knew I was living under a spell but no longer resisted it. It covered me like a wave, sweeping me off the shore and drawing me deep into the ocean.
As with all fairy tales, there is no smooth, sunlit path for Kathrin--or even for Violet, whom she must betray--but there is at least the promise of a happy ending. Read more

Our Price: $11.96 | You Save: $2.99 (20%)   

return to top

You'll find more great books, articles, and interviews in
Amazon.com's Gay & Lesbian section.