Items

• Autobiography in search of a father. Mother bound
  Jill Johnston (1929-2010) was a critic, journalist, feminist and leader of the lesbian-separatist movement in the 1970s. Before publishing perhaps her best-known work, ‘Lesbian Nation - The Feminist Solution’ in 1973, Johnston wrote on dance for the ‘Village Voice’ newspaper, and was the first of its columnists to come out in print. ‘Mother Bound’ details her complicated family relationships and narrates her life up to 1965. Characterised as “readably rambling, pseudo-psychological ponderings” by one somewhat withering reviewer, though notably less experimental in form than her later criticism, ‘Mother Bound’ was followed by a second volume of autobiography, ‘Paper Daughter’, in 1985.
• Circles on the water : selected poems of Marge Piercy
  Marge Piercy (1936-) is perhaps best known for her speculative feminist tale ‘Woman on the Edge of Time’ (1976), although she has authored many other novels, short stories and poems. This book collects in one volume 150 of Piercy’s poems from seven titles published between 1963 and 1982. As a result of the twenty-year span, the poems reflect Piercy’s developing ideas and changing themes including her involvement in the USA activist group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), her enjoyment of growing fruit and vegetables in Cape Cod, her involvement in second-wave feminism and her Tarot poems. The book has been continuously in print ever since its first publication by Alfred A. Knopf.
• Cry to heaven
  ‘Cry to Heaven’ is a historical novel set in the world of eighteenth-century Italian opera. It follows castrato singer Guido Maffeo and his star student, the young Venetian nobleman Tonio Treschi, as they navigate same-sex love affairs, incestuous seductions and melodrama both on and off-stage. Anne Rice (1941-2021) was a prolific writer of gothic, erotic, and Christian fiction, perhaps best known for her 1976 debut, ‘Interview with the Vampire’, which was adapted into a feature film in 1994. ‘The Sleeping Beauty Quartet’, written under the pen name A.N. Roquelaure, explored sadomasochism and a range of sexualities and sexual practices. Rice has commented that “From the beginning, [...] gay readers [...] felt that my works involved a sustained gay allegory [...] I didn't set out to do that, but that was what they perceived.”
• Treasures on earth : a novel
  This novel is a fictionalised depiction of a real expedition to Machu Picchu in Peru which was undertaken by Hiram Bingham in 1911. Running parallel to the main narrative is the story of the trip’s photographer, Willie Hickler, who discovers his sexuality when he falls in love with the expedition’s Peruvian assistant, Ernesto. Author Carter Wilson (1942?-), who later became an academic and Professor of Community Studies, described this book as “my coming-out novel”. The book was published by the well-established Knopf imprint and received good reviews, including from Christopher Isherwood who compared it to E. M. Forster’s ‘A Passage to India’.