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Olive Higgins Prouty

This pulp classic of motherhood and money introduced the immortal character portrayed on film by Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Midler—“a feminist gem” (Michael Bronski).

An ambitious woman from working-class roots, Stella sets her sights on marrying rich—and hits a bullseye. But her unshakable crudeness becomes too much for her husband. When he leaves her, she keeps their daughter Laurel. And now Stella sets her sights one again—this time, on giving her daughter the life she could never achieve for herself.

Originally published in 1923, this epic tale inspired the first radio soap opera, a Broadway play, and multiple films, including the Oscar-nominated 1937 movie starring Barbara Stanwyck and the 1990 movie Stella starring Bette Midler. Stella Dallas is a razor-sharp critique of our societal obsession with the judgment of mothers, offering cultural commentary that is still shockingly relevant nearly one hundred years after its initial publication.

The Feminist Press at CUNY

Femmes Fatales

Stella Dallas

Vera Caspary

A husband falls into a psychological spiral in a novel by the author of Laura, “an expert at suspense and suspicion” (The New York Times).

When Fletcher marries Elaine, his second wife, nineteen years his junior, he can't imagine a more passionate union. Then an illness destroys his confidence, and all he can picture is her next affair. He keeps a secret diary of his fantasized suspicions, making his impending suicide look like murder...

 With what Graham Greene once called her “devilish cunning,” Vera Caspary reveals, with sure psychological insight, the strange desires that hide in the hearts of seemingly respectable people. Out of a web of love, jealousy, guilt, and hate, she has woven one of her most suspenseful thrillers.

“Caspary writes emotive entertainments, part romance, part suspense, about women destined to kill or doomed to die.”—Kirkus Reviews

“A beautiful job.”—The Boston Herald
The Man Who Loved His Wife is part of the Femmes Fatales series, featuring the best of women’s writing in the classic pulp genres of the mid-20th century. From mystery to hard-boiled noir to taboo lesbian romance, these rediscovered queens of pulp offer subversive perspectives on a turbulent era with such titles as Now, Voyager; Stella Dallas; Bunny Lake is Missing; The Girls in 3-B; and more.

The Man Who Loved His Wife

Valerie Taylor

The pulp fiction classic. “Taylor was able to creatively incorporate her radical politics with lesbian feminism and her marketable craft of storytelling.”—Marcia M. Gallo, author of Different Daughters

Sapphic suburban housewife Frances seeks fulfillment and love from the odd girls and twilight lovers of small-town America’s queer demi-monde in this provocative novel from the author of Stranger on Lesbos, Whisper Their Love, and The Girls in 3-B.

“Frances Ollenfield escaped a childhood of abuse and poverty into a marriage that is slowly becoming more and more loveless as the family’s fortunes improve. When her husband suggests that she go back to university to finish her degree, Frances leaps at the chance—which happens to bring her Mary Baker, Bake to her friends, who soon becomes her lover . . . a fast-paced and melodramatic story.”—Lesbrary

“Valerie Taylor stands out, for the politics and realism she packs into her tight little stories . . . Taylor’s real subversion is to continue her heroine’s story in another book. Like Ann Bannon before her, Taylor unravels her earlier book’s hetero conclusion in a sequel—the tellingly named Return to Lesbos.”—Lambda Literary

Return to Lesbos

Tereska Torres

A coming of age novel set in post-war France by an author who “launched the modern genre of the lesbian paperback” (Susan Stryker, author of Queer Pulp).

When eighteen-year-old Cécile is orphaned at the end of World War II, the curious and adventurous Catholic student finds refuge in Paris, and with an older man. A former member of the Resistance with Cécile’s parents, Maurice is handsome, a thrilling cultured patron of the arts, and a mentor eager to introduce the budding young author to his intimate circle of friends—Cocteau, Sartre, and Eartha Kitt! 

As liberating an influence as he is, Maurice also encourages Cécile to shed her inhibitions he sees as bourgeois. Possessing a sensual and passionate temperament, Cécile is eager to begin exploring—by sharing Maurice’s mistress, and writing of every life-changing and delightfully scandalous new experience.

Credited with penning the first, candidly lesbian novel—Women’s Barracks, in 1950—Tereska Torrès “scandalized mid-century America” (The New York Times). In By Cécile, written in 1963, “Madame Torres has re-imagined a youthful Colette (here called Cécile) 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. [It’s] a sharply perceptive novel” (Joan Schenkar, author of The Talented Miss Highsmith).

By Cécile

“You must read Bedelia”, the seductive black-widow thriller by the author of the classic film noir, Laura (The New York Times).

Charlie Horst has returned with his new bride, Bedelia, to his family home in Connecticut. Indulgently infatuated, Charlie is the luckiest man alive. What’s not to love about Bedelia? She’s gorgeous and complacent. She’s also a gracious and ideal party host—luscious and decorative in blue velvet. 

And in public, she plays the part of worshipful wife to perfection. In private, even more so. Who can blame Charlie for overlooking her little deceptions? Or for not paying any mind to her contradictory claims about her past? When Charlie falls ill due to a freak poisoning, Charlie knows that Bedelia will be right his side, watching him closely. But who’s watching Bedelia?

“Vera Caspary wrote thrillers—but not like any other author of her time, male or female. Her specialty was a specific type that she pioneered—the psycho thriller” (Huffington Post) and this “sinister entertainment” (The New Yorker), is Caspary at “her most chilling” (SistersinCrime. com). Filmed in 1946, and starring Margaret Lockwood, it’s “a tour de force of psychological suspense … Desperate Housewives meets Double Indemnity in Bedelia” (Liahna Armstrong, President Emeritus, Popular Culture Association).

Bedelia

This classic pulp novel about three young women who leave behind their small-town roots for the big city is "a remarkable slice of bohemia from the 1950s" and a "wondrous tale of love, lesbianism, poetry, and sex" (Jack Halberstam).

Annice, Pat, and Barby are best friends from Iowa, freshly arrived in booming 1950s Chicago to explore different paths toward independence, self-expression, and sexual freedom. From the hip-hang of a bohemian lifestyle to the sophisticated lure of romance with a handsome, wealthy, married boss to the happier security of a lesbian relationship, these three experience firsthand the dangers and limitations of women’s economic reliance on men.

Lesbian pulp author Valerie Taylor skillfully paints a sociological portrait of the emotional and economic pitfalls of heterosexuality in 1950s America—and then offers a defiantly subversive alternative. A classic pulp tale showcasing predatory beatnik men, drug hallucinations, and secret lesbian trysts, The Girls in 3-B approaches the theme of sex from the stiffened vantage point of 1950s psychology.

Femmes Fatales restores to print the best of women’s writing in the classic pulp genres of the mid-20th century. From mystery to hard-boiled noir to taboo lesbian romance, these rediscovered queens of pulp offer subversive perspectives on a turbulent era.

The Girls in 3-B

The iconic American melodrama that inspired the 1943 cult classic film starring Bette Davis. “Charlotte Vale a timeless and very sophisticated Cinderella. ” —Patricia Gaffney, New York Times bestselling author

“Don’t let’s ask for the moon! We have the stars!”

The film Now, Voyager concludes with these famous words, which reaffirmed Bette Davis’s own stardom and changed the way Americans smoked cigarettes. But few fans of this rich story know its source. Olive Higgins Prouty’s 1941 novel provides a rich, complex portrait of the inner life of its protagonist and the society she inhabits. Over half a century later, it still offers fresh and quietly radical takes on psychiatric treatment, traditional family life, female desire, and women’s agency.

Boston blueblood Charlotte Vale has led an unhappy, sheltered life. Dowdy, repressed, and pushing forty, Charlotte finds salvation in the unlikely form of a nervous breakdown, placing her at a sanitarium, where she undergoes treatment to rebuild her ravaged self-esteem and uncover her true intelligence and charm.

Femmes Fatales restores to print the best of women’s writing in the classic pulp genres of the mid-20th century. From mystery to hard-boiled noir to taboo lesbian romance, these rediscovered queens of pulp offer subversive perspectives on a turbulent era.

“Like the film it inspired, Olive Higgins Prouty’s Now, Voyager is as striking for the conventions it bucks as for the ones it embraces: a vivid reminder of a time when people crossed the ocean in liners and wore hats, and a hymn to an American ideal of social, moral, and emotional independence. ” —David Leavitt, author of Shelter in Place

Now, Voyager

Gypsy Rose Lee

This encore performance by the author of The G-String Murders is simply “one of the greatest mysteries ever written” (Philadelphia Daily News).

It’s supposed to be a quiet honeymoon getaway for celebrated stripper Gypsy Rose Lee and Biff Brannigan, ex-comic and ex-Casanova of the Burly Q circuit, settled as they are in a cozy trailer built for two. If you don’t count Gypsy’s overbearing mother, a monkey act, and Gee Gee, a. k. a. the Platinum Panic. Not to mention the best man found shot to death in the bathtub. Strippers are used to ballyhoo, but this time it’s murder.

Leave it to Gypsy and her latest scandal to draw a crowd: Biff’s burnt-out ex-flame, a sleazy dive owner with a Ziegfeld complex, a bus-and-truck circus troupe, and a local Texas sheriff randy for celebrities. But when another corpse turns up with a knife in his back, Gypsy fears that some rube is dead set on pulling the curtain on her bump and grind. She’s been in the biz long enough to know this ghastly mess is just a tease of things to come.

Mother Finds a Body

Femmes Fatales restores to print the best of women’s writing in the classic pulp genres of the mid-20th century. From hard-boiled noir to taboo lesbian romance, these rediscovered queens of pulp offer subversive perspectives on a turbulent era. 

Femmes Fatales - De serie

Femmes Fatales - De serie

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