Joan Nestle

Phenomenal; an incredible multiplicity of voices, thoughtfully organized. Still feels very urgent and necessary nearly 30 years after its publication. My main complaint is the lack of inclusion of out transfem authors; though discussions of transfeminity are definitely present in the book, they remain entirely marginal.

this collection of short stories is far and away better than the first in the series (i think it's the last of 3, at least with these editors). there were only a couple of stories that i wanted to skip and many that led me to check out other works by a number of the authors.

so, first, the things i liked: i liked that each of these stories was written by or about people we don't often hear from. while every story in some way touched or was about lesbians and/or lesbianism, many of them were also written by and about people of color. i liked that. it's also nice to see how far we've come, because these stories were all written by 1989 at the latest, and a lot has changed in our mainstream culture. it's easy to lose sight of that when you're looking at how far show more there is to go, so that was a nice reminder.

so, what i didn't like: most of these stories are at best decently written. most of the stories were alright, idea-wise, but the writing was generally sub-par, which was really disappointing. a couple were pretty good, but that was about as good as it got. there's not a lot to choose from out there, so i'll keep reading stuff like this, but i wish there were better options. show less

there were a few really stellar pieces in here, by authors who can hardly be found elsewhere, which is great. i don't like reading excerpts from longer works and there was an awful lot of that here. maybe, though, these authors were too hard to find otherwise. because the editors did do a nice job of incorporating writing from many places in the world.

i didn't like the number of excerpts and i didn't like all of the writing, but this is an excellent look at international writing and show more translating, and has some work by authors that are hard to find elsewhere, so for that it's worth it. i still had a hard time getting through it and was hoping to like more of the selections than i did, though. show less