Honey Mine
Collected Stories
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Honey Mine unfolds as both excavation and romp, an adventure story that ushers readers into a lesbian writer’s coming of age through disorienting, unsparing, and exhilarating encounters with sex, gender, and distinctly American realities of race and class. From childhood in Chicago’s South Side to youth in the lesbian underground, Roy’s politics find joyful and transgressive expression in the liberatory potential of subculture. Find here, in these new, uncollected and out-of-print fictions by a master of New Narrative, a record of survival and thriving under conditions of danger.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This inventive and substantial collection from poet and performance artist Roy (Sherwood Forest) demonstrates the author's sharp wit and laser-eyed analysis of gender and class issues, punctuated by perspective on the realities of being a lesbian in the U.S. In "Isher House" the narrator explores a run-down historic house with her then-girlfriend and learns that neighborhood myths, like relationships, are sometimes built on fantasy. In "Lynette #1," a crush becomes the gateway to a party world of exhilarating temptations and nested stories. Roy manipulates literary forms to suit her material, as in "Baby or Whose Body Is Missing," originally written for a gallery performance and composed of a fractured outline describing an infant's breast feeding along with snippets of narrative ("I was a bar dyke before all this gender-theory crap came along. I kissed and fucked like every other girl in my invisible world"). Throughout, she writes about articulating the truth of experience: "Writing a story is a little like dragging a tree out of a dark wood and then wrapping it with strings of starry lights." Her best work mixes fact and fiction, as Roy constructs metafictional puzzles while ruminating on the past: "My histories have no accuracy to them, but they are crammed with facts." Fans of experimental fiction should take note.
