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We follow an Irish woman as she travels through time in search of a wronged maiden, and anticipate the harrowing fate of a married Indian woman who pursues pleasure with her female lover under the shadow of her husbands suspicious rage. We meet a teacher in Barcelona who locks herself up in her grandmother's house with her young Columbian student, and witness a Slovenian woman's rendezvous with her long dead lover.
This collection includes the work of familiar writers, as well as a number never before published in English. From the West Indies to Eastern Europe, the Middle East to Southeast Asia, Latin America to South Africa, the distinctive stories found in these pages evoke the diverse political, cultural, emotional, and sexual landscapes of each writer's life. A groundbreaking volume from the Lamda Award-winning editors Naomi Holoch and Joan Nestle, who also wrote the introduction, this collections evokes the universal urgency of persistent desire.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
March 31, 2010 -
Formats
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780307561015
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780307561015
- File size: 2001 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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May 31, 1999
With more than 35 selections, this anthology is notable for the insight it offers into cultures across the globe and the attitudes of various societies toward women in general and lesbians in particular. Several contributors approach the idea of homosexuality as the forbidden fruit via supernatural means. In one of the most ambitious and successful pieces, Egyptian writer Alifa Rifaat describes a prominent married woman's mystical and sensual liaison with a female snake, a "monarch of the djinn," weaving in religious allusions alongside domestic details. Emma Donoghue's haunting "Looking for Petronilla" explores issues of class disparity and fierce loyalty in Ireland as a woman travels back through time to search for a wronged bondswoman. Others evoke raw desire, as in "Madame Alaird's Breasts," by Trinidadian-born Dionne Brand, a meditation on a French teacher's voluptuous figure by her adolescent girl students, and the more understated excerpt from St phanie's Book by French writer Mireille Best, an atmospheric scene in which a married woman is seduced by her son's teacher. Informative prefaces set each piece in the context of the writer's work and culture. What characterizes this wide-ranging assemblage of selections is the universal struggle of each character to be her own woman in her own time.
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