"Lesbian Pulp Fiction"

Lesbian Pulp Fiction: The Sexually Intrepid World of Lesbian Paperback Novels 1950-1965 (Katherine V. Forrest, editor)

This is an interesting book, but I'm not really the target audience. The editor describes finding one of these novels in 1957 as "as nessessary to me as air"; Since that doesn't apply to me I found it to be more of an interesting collection of curios. For being pulp paperbacks from the 50's and early 60's I was surprised at how good most of the writing is, and Forrest's careful selection runs the gamut - although most books at the time had to have downer endings where the heroines either were locked up or were "cured" and happily settled down with Good Men (TM), Forrest has managed to either pick books without this mandated theme or excerpted the parts without it, so you get all kinds of different flavors. As a result the book's always interesting, and if you find a selection you don't like (and I'm not sure I ever did), it's just a few page flips before you're in a totally different world. I'm not really sure who to recommend this to, but I guess if you've read this far you'll be able to figure out if this is the kind of book you'd be interested in.

Grade: Uh, good?