The Terrible Girls - Softcover

Brown, Rebecca

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0872862666 ISBN 13: 9780872862661

Publisher: City Lights Publishers, 1992

Synopsis

The girls on the prowl in The Terrible Girls are indeed terrible—relentless in love, ruthless in betrayal. These thematically linked stories depict a contemporary Gothic world in which body parts are traded for love, wounds never heal, and self-sacrifice is often the only way out.

"In this brilliantly original work, Rebecca Brown gives us haunting parables of betrayal and love, of loss and resurrection, of loneliness and solidarity. Like a modern Djuna Barnes, Brown creates a language of telling that is fiercely beautiful and honest. This book is a love story unlike any you have read before. Its subversive and passionate transformation carry the lesbian literary voice onto the 21st century." —Joan Nestle

"A dry, witty, graceful–if savage–gift." —Mary Gaitskill

"The Terrible Girls comes from one of the fiercest, most potent, original writers around: a bloody flayer of skins, both other's and her own . . . a work of possessed and persuasive visionary power." —The Listener

"The Terrible Girls is a powerful account of erotic love which exchanges the comforts of illusion for more complex and less certain rewards." —The Times Literary Supplement

Rebecca Brown is the winner of the 2003 Washington State Book Award. Her books, which are all published by City Lights, include: The Haunted House, The Terrible Girls, The End of Youth, The Last Time I Saw You, and The Dogs, Annie Oakley's Girl. She was awarded a Genius Award and grant from Seattle's weekly magazine, The Stranger.

About this title

About the Author:

Rebecca Brown is the author of a dozen books of prose including THE LAST TIME I SAW YOU, THE END OF YOUTH, THE DOGS, THE TERRIBLE GIRLS (City Lights) and THE GIFTS OF THE BODY (HarperCollins). She recently co-edited, with Mary Jane Knecht, an anthology of writers' responses to work at the Frye Art Museum.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A debut collection of eight stories--by the American author of The Haunted House (1986) and The Children's Crusade--that was first published two years ago in England. These edgy, intense, and relentlessly abstract fictions are reminiscent of Brown's most obvious precursor, Djuna Barnes. Like Barnes, Brown explores the boundaries of erotic and emotional life in imagistic prose. Her neo-gothic sensibility reduces narrative to its essence and insists on the literal dimension of figurative language. When the narrator of ``Forgiveness'' promises to give her right arm for love, her lover bronzes the amputated limb. ``The Dark House'' and ``Isle of Skye'' are allegories of passion and betrayal in a world where female lovers explore each other like foreign countries, giving new meaning to the notion of wanderlust. The betrayed lover-narrator of ``Junk Mail'' searches for the secret meaning in her generic mail- -until the post delivers her lost body parts. The narrator who plays doctor in ``Dr. Frankenstein, I Presume'' extracts a heart made of candy from her faithless lover. But if love inevitably leads to dismemberment in Brown's linked stories, there can be no forgiveness or healing. Desire shrouded in secrecy--and scorned by many--results in social hypocrisy as well (``Lady Bountiful and the Underground Resistance''). In the meantime, the landscape may be devastated in ``The Ruined City,'' but this last story ends with a chilling affirmation, a literally ``resurrected heart.'' With her stainless-steel prose, Brown surgically dissects ambivalent hearts--and also those that pulse with the love that here never speaks its name. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: City Lights Publishers
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0872862666
• ISBN 13: 9780872862661
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 136