Do we need bodies for sex? Is gender in the head or in the body? In Second Skins Jay Prosser reveals the powerful drive that leads men and women literally to shed their skins and--in flesh and head--to cross the boundary of sex. Telling their story is not merely an act that comes after the fact, it's a force of its own that makes it impossible to forget that stories of identity inhabit autobiographical bodies.In this stunning first extensive study of transsexual autobiography, Jay ...

American Fiction of the 1990s: Reflections of History and Culture brings together essays from international experts to examine one of the most vital and energized decades in American literature. This volume reads the rich body of 1990s American fiction in the context of key cultural concerns of the period.The issues that the contributors identify as especially productive include:Immigration and America’s geographical borders, particularly those with Latin Ame...

Do we need bodies for sex? Is gender in the head or in the body? In Second Skins Jay Prosser reveals the powerful drive that leads men and women literally to shed their skins and--in flesh and head--to cross the boundary of sex. Telling their story is not merely an act that comes after the fact, it's a force of its own that makes it impossible to forget that stories of identity inhabit autobiographical bodies.In this stunning first extensive study of transsexual autobiography, Jay ...

Her 1958 novel The Planet Savers introduced the planet of Darkover, which became the setting of a popular series by Bradley and other authors. The Darkover milieu may be considered as either fantasy with science fiction overtones or as science fiction with fantasy overtones, as Darkover is a lost earth colony where psi powers developed to an unusual degree. Bradley wrote many Darkover novels by herself, but in her later years collaborated with other authors for publication; her literary co...

We believe we know our bodies intimately—that their material reality is certain and that this certainty leads to an epistemological truth about sex, gender, and identity. By exploring and giving equal weight to transgendered subjectivities, however, Gayle Salamon upends these certainties. Considering questions of transgendered embodiment via phenomenology (Maurice Merleau-Ponty), psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud and Paul Ferdinand Schilder), and queer theory, Salamon advances an alternative t...

This book is the definitive critical history of science fiction. The 2006 first edition of this work traced the development of the genre from Ancient Greece and the European Reformation through to the end of the 20th century. This new 2nd edition has been revised thoroughly and very significantly expanded. An all-new final chapter discusses 21st-century science fiction, and there is new material in every chapter: a wealth of new readings and original research. The author’s groundbreaking t...

Today it's called In Search of Lost Time, though an earlier generation knew it as Remembrance of Things Past. Under whatever title, and whichever translator, Proust's gargantuan novel has challenged English-speaking readers for nearly a century.Over the course of twelve months, Stephen Fall tackled the recent and lovely Penguin/Viking editions, blogging on the internet as he read. He devotes a short chapter to each of the novel's seven books, introducing it with a...

Founder of the Left Bank bookstore Shakespeare and Company and the first publisher of James Joyce's Ulysses, Sylvia Beach had a legendary facility for nurturing literary talent. In this first collection of her letters, we witness Beach's day-to-day dealings as bookseller and publisher to expatriate Paris. Friends and clients include Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, H. D., Ezra Pound, Janet Flanner, William Carlos Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Richard Wright. As ...

“When the first cannon sounded over Charleston Harbor in 1861, it announced the beginning of an American literary phenomenon. Readers North and South hungered for imaginative writing about the escalating war, and canny publishers were swift to deliver. . . . Today even the most conservative estimate would place the total number of Civil War novels at well over one thousand, and this figure does not account for the thousands of war-related stories published in journals, newspapers, and maga...

In her first book since the critically acclaimed Female Masculinity, Judith Halberstam examines the significance of the transgender body in a provocative collection of essays on queer time and space. She presents a series of case studies focused on the meanings of masculinity in its dominant and alternative forms’especially female and trans-masculinities as they exist within subcultures, and are appropriated within mainstream culture.In a Queer Time and Place

Newsweek calls him "exhilarating and deeply engaging." Time Out New York calls him "smart, provocative, and a great writer." Critic Peter Schjeldahl, meanwhile, simply calls him "My hero." There's no one in the art world quite like Dave Hickey—and a new book of his writing is an event.25 Women will not disappoint. The book collects Hickey's best and most important writing about female artists from the past twenty years. But this is far more than a compila...

Generation X, comprised of people born between 1960 and 1980, is a generation with no Great War or Depression to define it. Dismissed as apathetic slackers and detached losers, Xers have a striking disregard for the causes and isms that defined their Boomer parents. In Disappear Here: Violence after Generation X, Naomi Mandel argues that this characterization of Generation X can be traced back to changing experiences and representations of violence in the late twentieth c...