by Vera Caspary
—Boston Post
GYPSY ROSE LEE (1911–1970) was the most famous burlesque performer and striptease artist of her day, renowned as much for her witty repartee as for removing her clothes. Born Louise Hovick in Seattle, Washington, Lee first performed with her sister on the vaudeville circuit, eventually landing star billing at a top New York City burlesque theater. In 1937 she moved to Hollywood and went on to appear in twelve films and her own television show. A regular contributor to the New Yorker, Lee published two novels, and her memoir, Gypsy (1957), which became the inspiration for the hugely popular Broadway musical, Gypsy: A Musical Fable and the 1962 film starring Rosalind Russell and Natalie Wood.
THE GIRLS IN 3-B
Valerie Taylor
Afterword by Lisa Walker
eISBN: 9781558617629 | ISBN: 9781558614567
Annice, Barby, and Pat are the girls in 3-B, three young women straight out of high school who leave their hometowns and land in the big city. In 1950s Chicago, they find refuge and danger. Encounters with predatory beatnik men, workplace drama, and lesbian trysts—the girls grow up quickly in this explosive melodrama about sexual identity and female friendship.
“The Girls in 3-B will give you a sense of the dangers and delights of passion between women in another era. . . . Valerie Taylor’s much-loved story has achieved well-deserved classic status in the lesbian pulp canon.”
—Ann Bannon, author of Odd Girl Out
“A remarkable slice of bohemia, Valerie Taylor gives ‘pulp’ a good name and weaves a wondrous tale of love, lesbianism, poetry, and sex around three young women who leave their small town for the allure of the big city.”
—Judith Halberstam, author of Female Masculinity
STRANGER ON LESBOS
Valerie Taylor
Afterword by Marcia Gallo
eISBN: 9781558618008 | ISBN: 9781558617995
Sexy, beautiful, frustrated . . . a neglected housewife finds the delights and degradations of forbidden love. Frances, a 1950s housewife, becomes bored with her suburban life and enrolls in a class at the local community college. When she meets Bake, a butch lesbian, her life completely changes. In thrall to a world of martini lunches, late nights at queer bars, and a sexual passion she never knew was possible, Frances must choose between the safety of being a wife and mother, or the dangers of life on the edge of society. In this age of Mad Men fever, the reissue of Stranger on Lesbos comes at a perfect moment, invoking an era we can’t help but romanticize yet despise.
VALERIE TAYLOR is the pen name of Velma Young (1913-1997), prolific author of best-selling pulp fiction novels, poetry, and romances, including Whisper Their Love, The Girls in 3-B, World Without Women, Journey to Fulfillment, Stranger on Lesbos, and Ripening. A longtime activist for gay and lesbian rights, she was a co-founder of Mattachine Midwest and the Lesbian Writers Conference in Chicago.
BY CECILE
Tereska Torres
eISBN: 9781558618060 | ISBN: 9781558618053
In Paris, a young woman with the spirit of an artist finds refuge with an older man just after WWII. He introduces her to nightclubs, intellectuals, and non-monogamy. Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Eartha Kitt all make an appearance. When she falls for his mistress, she begins to live a life she deems worthy of writing about . . . but only under the pseudonym of her husband. By Cecile is a sensational story of modern love and personal transformation.
“Madame Torres has reimagined a youthful Colette (here called Cecile) in the infinitely seductive post-World War II period in Paris, where she moves like a sleeping princess through the perverse fairy tales of man-made cafe society. By Cecile is a sharply perceptive novel.”
—Joan Schenkar, author of The Talented Miss Highsmith
WOMEN’S BARRACKS
Tereska Torres
Afterword by Judith Mayne
Interview with the author by Joan Schenkar
eISBN: 9781558617148 | ISBN: 9781558614949
The grim setting of an urban military barracks—with its freezing dorms, rationed food, and unbecoming regulation under-wear—became the setting for one of the steamiest novels of its time and the first-ever lesbian pulp. Written from the point of view of one of the younger and more innocent girl soldiers, Women’s Barracks reflects Tereska Torres’s experiences in the Free French forces assembled under General Charles de Gaulle. Condemned in 1952 for its “artful appeals to sensuality, immorality, filth, perversion, and degeneracy” by the House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials, this novel became an underground phenomenon, selling four million copies in the US and many more abroad.
“As a lesbian historian, as a citizen of a war-torn world, simply as a reader, I found this 1950 novel, considered obscene in its own time, moving, arousing, and deeply interesting.”
—Joan Nestle, author of A Restricted Country
“Women’s Barracks stands not only as a classic in our literary heritage, but as a fascinating view of the intensity and resilience of the lesbian spirit.”
—Radclyffe, author of Sheltering Dunes
TERESKA TORRES’s Women’s Barracks is widely considered to be the first lesbian pulp novel. It is based on her own experiences as a young woman in the Free French forces during WWII. Condemned in 1952, the novel became an underground phenomenon, selling over four million copies. Torres went on to write many more bestselling novels in France, which were often brought to an American audience by her husband, the author Meyer Levin. Torres lives in Paris, where she is completing her memoirs.
About the Author
VERA CASPARY is the author of twenty-one books. Her early novels drew on her experience growing up a conservative Jewish family in Chicago. Later works focused on career women who balance work, a love life, and even marriage, with a desire for independence. Caspary is best known for her skillfully-crafted and psychologically-complex murder mysteries. Several of her books were made into films, including both Bedelia and Laura. Enormously popular in her time, she was also a playwright and screenwriter, with such classics as Fritz Lang's The Blue Gardenia and Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Letter to Three Wives having been adapted from her screen stories. Reviewing her autobiography, The Secrets of Grown-Ups, The Washington Post called Caspary's life "a Baedeker of the 20th century. An independent woman in an unliberated era, she collided with or was touched by many of its major historical and cultural events: wars, the Depression, the Spanish Civil War . . . Hollywood in its romantic heyday, Hollywood in the grip of McCarthyism, the footloose of the artistic rich, publishing, Broadway."