Growing up in a small town and realizing I was gay, I saw nothing but dread ahead of me. In graduate school, I came across a one-sentence description of Margaret Anderson as a “lesbian anarchist.” I knew I was home. My book is the first full-length biography of Anderson and her partner, Jane Heap. They went through a lot of crap–they were tried for publishing Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses–but above all, they were witty rebels, strong women, and proud and out.
I wrote
Making No Compromise: Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, and the "Little Review"
I love the humor, self-confidence, and acerbic wit of Margaret Anderson–a woman known by few, but those who know her love her.
Writing in her thirties she looks back with a keen eye for the geniuses of modernism–Joyce, Eliot, Pound, etc. She also, with her lover Jane Heap, published early feminist and LGBTQ content. And she is funny. An iconoclast from Day 1.
Like Anderson, Gertrude Stein had a sense of humor about gay Paree. Who else would write someone else’s autobiography?
I love her tone of detached amusement when describing the artistic titans of the Lost Generation. If you don’t get it, try the recipe for Alice B. Toklas brownies.
This biography gives you the inside experience of one of the most visible lesbians in Paris during the mid-twentieth century.
Genet was the pseudonym for Janet Flanner, The New Yorker’s correspondent for France. Flanner knew and wrote about everyone. Her column noting Anderson’s death is particularly touching. From Indiana to the City of Lights in one lifetime.
The daughter of an Indianapolis mortician, Janet Flanner really began to live at the age of thirty, when she fled to Paris with her female lover. That was in 1921, a few years before she signed on as Paris correspondent for the New Yorker, taking the pseudonym Genet. For half a century she described life on the Continent with matchless elegance.
They were poets, actresses, singers, artists, journalists, publishers, baronesses, and benefactresses. They were thinkers, and they were drinkers. Edna St Vincent Millay, Djuna Barnes, Isadora Duncan, and Ma Rainey–knew how to have fun.
I love the way the author deftly describes each woman—women who lived in an era that still defined women as second-class citizens. Each was unique in her own way—bold, brassy, and making no compromise with gender and sexual norms of the day.
This book is an entertaining and informative guide to the music, martinis, and sometimes mayhem of these daring, brazen, and historical heroines!
They were smart. Sassy. Daring. Exotic. Eclectic. Sexy. And influential. One could call them the first divas--and they ran absolutely wild. They were poets, actresses, singers, artists, journalists, publishers, baronesses, and benefactresses. They were thinkers and they were drinkers. They eschewed the social conventions expected of them--to be wives and mothers--and decided to live on their own terms. In the process, they became the voices of a new, fierce feminine spirit.There's Mina Loy, a modernist poet and much-photographed beauty who traveled in pivotal international art circles; blues divas Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters; Edna St. Vincent Millay, the lyric poet…
A murder mystery set in Prohibition Greenwich Village–fun, frothy, and a fictional but true new take on all of these lovely ladies.
I love the recapturing of the Village of the era–the winding streets, brownstones, speakeasies, and gangsters. Who is the dead woman detective Olivia Brown tripped over?
In a mystery set in New York's Greenwich Village during the Roaring Twenties, newly published poet Olivia Brown, determined to experience everything her bohemian neighborhood has to offer, suddenly finds herself embroiled in a murder and on the trail of a killer bent on revenge
My book is the first book-length account of the lives of Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, the women who founded the avant-garde journal The Little Review in Chicago in 1914.
Born in the nineteenth-century Midwest, Anderson and Heap grew up to be iconoclastic rebels, living openly as lesbians and advocating causes from anarchy to feminism and free love. As their paths crisscrossed Chicago, New York, Paris, and Europe; two World Wars; and a parade of the most celebrated artists of their time, they transformed themselves and their journal into major forces for shifting perspectives on literature and art. They were “out” lesbians in the early 20th century; both had a rollicking sense of humor and saw through the social/sexual absurdities of their time.
Writer, reader, editor, reviewer, publisher… those are all parts of me. With a lifetime of experience in the “words” industry, I have a pretty good handle on what makes a book not just good, but hot. I say this with the understanding that each reader brings their own histories to the reading experience, and what one person may like, another may not. Nonetheless, I offer you my professional and personal favorites in the mystery/thriller/suspense categories. It is my sincere hope that you find these books as addictive as I’d found them. Superb and clever writing, engaging characters, unpredictable plots—yes, please! Though I occasionally step outside my comfort zone, I'm consistently drawn back to these categories.
Liza O’Connell was a horror buff in every sense of the word. But there was one deadly nightmare she would never be able to talk about … her own. A friend murdered. A business in trouble. A marriage struggling to survive. And that’s just the beginning.
When salon owner Carrie King discovers Liza dead in the back room of her shop, everyone becomes a suspect, even her. As tensions in the community rise, so does the death toll, and now the local cops believe there’s a serial killer on the loose. The question is … are the two investigations connected?…
Liza O’Connell was a horror buff in every sense of the word. But there was one deadly nightmare she would never be able to talk about … her own.
A friend murdered.
A business in trouble.
A marriage struggling to survive.
And that’s just the beginning.
When salon owner Carrie King discovers Liza dead in the back room of her shop, everyone becomes a suspect, even her. As tensions in the community rise, so does the death toll, and now the local cops believe there’s a serial killer on the loose. The question is … are the two investigations connected?…
