The Terrible Girls
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
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, The Dogs and Annie Oakley's Girl. She was awarded a Genius Award and grant from Seattle's weekly magazine, The Stranger.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Brown's ( The Children's Crusade ) collection of short stories is not for the light-hearted or optimistic. Throughout she traces unfulfilled lesbians in unsuccessful relationships, bearing burdens of pain that cannot be purged even by self-mutilation. The symbolic meaning underneath these often allegorical tales is most directly presented in a story about a woman carrying a burdensome bag on her back. Even after burying the bag, the narrator cannot escape its weight and remains waiting. The women who inhabit these gothic landscapes are all waiting for something, whether the commitment of a lover caught up in her own life or the return of a lover for whom a narrator has given her right arm, quite literally. Unfortunately, Brown is not able to present any picture of what sort of fruit all of this waiting around might bear. In an allegory on radical feminism, Brown sets up a conflict in a kingdom of gender oppression between a resistance movement and Lady Bountiful, who once flirted with the resistance but instead abandoned her principles, and her lover, to marry Lord Bountiful. This story offers the most action and most developed characters in the collection but suffers from self-righteousness.
