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  “With its sexual bargains and betrayals, insider trades and financial maneuvers, Skyscraper is pulp fiction at its best.”

  —Maria Dibattista, author of Fast-Talking Dames

  “A captivating and quietly subversive novel, featuring a spunky young working woman struggling to make it on her own. Skyscraper declares that despite all challenges, women should insist on their right to have it all.”

  —Alicia Daly, Ms.

  FAITH BALDWIN (1893–1978) was one of the most prolific mid-twentieth century authors of popular fiction. She published eighty-five books between 1921 and 1977, many of them focused on women juggling family and career, including White Collar Girl, Men Are Such Fools!, and An Apartment for Peggy, which was made into a Hollywood film in 1948.

  BEDELIA

  Vera Caspary

  Afterword by A. B. Emrys

  eISBN: 9781558616486 | ISBN: 9781558615076

  Long before Desperate Housewives, there was Bedelia: beautiful and “adoring as a kitten.” An ideal housekeeper and lover, she wants nothing more than to please her insecure new husband, who can’t believe his luck. But is Bedelia too good to be true? A mysterious new neighbor turns out to be a detective on the trail of a picture-perfect wife with a string of dead husbands in her wake. Caspary builds this story to a peak of psychological suspense when her characters are trapped together in a blizzard. The true Bedelia—the woman who escaped a life on the street—is revealed.

  “You must read Bedelia to see just how slick Miss Caspary’s technique of soft-shoe terror can be—how frightening she can make the chatter at an innocent dinner party, the lure of a lady’s deshabille, the glimpse of a black pearl in a dresser drawer.”

  —New York Times

  “A sinister entertainment, especially for admirers of the psychological horror story.”

  —New Yorker

  “Vera Caspary’s gift is perhaps more subtle and deadly than Jim Thompson’s, David Goodis’s, and Charles Willeford’s.”

  —Robert Polito, author of Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson

  “A tour de force of psychological suspense, Desperate Housewives meets Double Indemnity in Caspary’s Bedelia.”

  —Liahna Armstrong, President Emerita, Popular Culture Association

  BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING

  Evelyn Piper

  Afterword by Maria Dibattista

  eISBN: 9781558617759 | ISBN: 9781558614741

  Blanche Lake, a young mother, arrives to pick up her daughter at nursery school. But Bunny Lake has vanished, and soon everyone suspects that she is merely a figment of her mother’s female imagination. Searching desperately for her daughter, with no help from the police, Blanche needs every trick in the book to navigate a world that distrusts and disowns her. This psychological thriller was made into a classic motion picture in 1965 by Otto Preminger.

  “The distraught, gutsy, and hip mother I played in Bunny Lake Is Missing is my all-time favorite role.”

  —Carol Lynley

  “A brilliant tale of psychological suspense, Bunny Lake is Missing is a classic thriller—a riveting revisit to the dark side of the 50s, where the tension beneath the calm surface has an undertow that drags the reader into its grip. Prime pulp—pure pleasure.”

  —Linda Fairstein, author of The Bone Vault

  “A beautiful job . . . Frantic scenes of action, contagious terror, and near hysteria.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  EVELYN PIPER was the pseudonym of Merriam Modell (1908–1994), whose novels include The Lady and Her Doctor, Hanno’s Doll, and The Nanny (1965), which was made into a film starring Bette Davis.

  NOW, VOYAGER

  Olive Higgins Prouty

  Afterword by Judith Mayne

  eISBN: 9781558616332 | ISBN: 9781558614765

  A soaring romance and one of the greatest makeover stories in literature, Now, Voyager, first enthralled readers in 1941 and became a screen phenomenon the following year. Bette Davis triumphantly portrayed heroine Charlotte Vale, the shy, dowdy Boston heiress who blossoms into a defiant, sexually liberated woman. After a nervous breakdown releases her from the tyranny of her mother and blueblood society, Charlotte embarks on an ocean cruise where her fabulous new wardrobe and burgeoning charm lead to a love affair with a married man. Charlotte’s transformation has just begun. . . .

  “At last we have the moon and the stars: at last, that is, the public can read the novel on which one of Hollywood’s most stirring melodramas is based.”

  —Tania Modleski, author of Loving With a Vengeance

  “Like the film it inspired, Olive Higgins Prouty’s Now, Voyager is as striking for the conventions it bucks as for the ones it embraces: a vivid reminder of a time when people crossed the ocean in liners and wore hats, and a hymn to an American ideal of social, moral, and emotional independence.”

  —David Leavitt, author of The Man Who Knew Too Much

  OLIVE HIGGINS PROUTY (1882–1974) is the author of many books including Stella Dallas (1923), which was adapted into three films and a long-running radio serial. Later in her life, Prouty became patron and mentor to Sylvia Plath, and the inspiration for Philomena Guinea, the meddlesome character in Plath’s The Bell Jar.

  THE G-STRING MURDERS

  Gypsy Rose Lee

  Afterword by Rachel Shteir

  eISBN: 9781558617612 | ISBN: 9781558615038

  A mystery set in the underworld of burlesque theater in 1941, The G-String Murders draws from the larger-than-life experiences of the legendary queen of the striptease. When one performer is found strangled with a g-string, no one is above suspicion. The cops face off with the theater’s tough-talking guys, and it’s clear that Gypsy will have to crack the case herself. The basis of the 1943 film Lady of Burlesque starring Barbara Stanwyck, The G-String Murders was the first of two murder mysteries written by Gypsy Rose Lee.

  “Recommended for the readers who feel better when their eyebrows are raised.”

  —New Yorker

  “A rich and lusty job, brimming over with infectious vitality and a hilarious jargon of her own.”

  —Life

  “Lurid, witty. . . rich show business vocabulary and stage door gags make her book almost a social document. The G-String Murders builds up to a hair-raising climax.”

  —Time

  MOTHER FINDS A BODY

  Gypsy Rose Lee

  Foreword by Erik Lee Preminger

  eISBN: 9781558618022 | ISBN: 9781558618015

  A sexy, hard-boiled murder mystery by America’s most famous burlesque entertainer, this steamy sequel to The G-String Murders, Gypsy Rose Lee’s noir thriller, reads as if it’s ripped from her own diary pages. When her mother finds a dead body in Gypsy’s honeymoon trailer, Gypsy realizes that no one is who they seem to be and everyone is worthy of suspicion.

  “Pure ozone to those tired of ordinary oxygen.”

  —New Yorker

  “One of the greatest mysteries ever written.”

  —Philadelphia Daily News

  “Our most famous burlesque queen may raise the temperature with a strip tease, but she chills the blood when she goes into her detective routine.”

  —Boston Post

  GYPSY ROSE LEE (1911–1970) was the most famous burlesque performer and striptease artist of her day, renowned as much for her witty repartee as for removing her clothes. Born Louise Hovick in Seattle, Washington, Lee first performed with her sister on the vaudeville circuit, eventually landing star billing at a top New York City burlesque theater. In 1937 she moved to Hollywood and went on to appear in twelve films and her own television show. A regular contributor to the New Yorker, Lee published two novels, and her memoir, Gypsy (1957), which became the inspiration for the hugely popular Broadway musical, Gypsy: A Musical Fable and the 1962 film starring Rosalind Russell and Natalie Wood.

  THE GIRLS IN 3-B

  Valerie Taylor

  Afterword by Lisa Walker

  eISBN: 9781558617629 | ISBN: 978155861456
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  Annice, Barby, and Pat are the girls in 3-B, three young women straight out of high school who leave their hometowns and land in the big city. In 1950s Chicago, they find refuge and danger. Encounters with predatory beatnik men, workplace drama, and lesbian trysts—the girls grow up quickly in this explosive melodrama about sexual identity and female friendship.

  “The Girls in 3-B will give you a sense of the dangers and delights of passion between women in another era. . . . Valerie Taylor’s much-loved story has achieved well-deserved classic status in the lesbian pulp canon.”

  —Ann Bannon, author of Odd Girl Out

  “A remarkable slice of bohemia, Valerie Taylor gives ‘pulp’ a good name and weaves a wondrous tale of love, lesbianism, poetry, and sex around three young women who leave their small town for the allure of the big city.”

  —Judith Halberstam, author of Female Masculinity

  STRANGER ON LESBOS

  Valerie Taylor

  Afterword by Marcia Gallo

  eISBN: 9781558618008 | ISBN: 9781558617995

  Sexy, beautiful, frustrated . . . a neglected housewife finds the delights and degradations of forbidden love. Frances, a 1950s housewife, becomes bored with her suburban life and enrolls in a class at the local community college. When she meets Bake, a butch lesbian, her life completely changes. In thrall to a world of martini lunches, late nights at queer bars, and a sexual passion she never knew was possible, Frances must choose between the safety of being a wife and mother, or the dangers of life on the edge of society. In this age of Mad Men fever, the reissue of Stranger on Lesbos comes at a perfect moment, invoking an era we can’t help but romanticize yet despise.

  VALERIE TAYLOR is the pen name of Velma Young (1913-1997), prolific author of best-selling pulp fiction novels, poetry, and romances, including Whisper Their Love, The Girls in 3-B, World Without Women, Journey to Fulfillment, Stranger on Lesbos, and Ripening. A longtime activist for gay and lesbian rights, she was a co-founder of Mattachine Midwest and the Lesbian Writers Conference in Chicago.

  BY CECILE

  Tereska Torres

  eISBN: 9781558618060 | ISBN: 9781558618053

  In Paris, a young woman with the spirit of an artist finds refuge with an older man just after WWII. He introduces her to nightclubs, intellectuals, and non-monogamy. Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Eartha Kitt all make an appearance. When she falls for his mistress, she begins to live a life she deems worthy of writing about . . . but only under the pseudonym of her husband. By Cecile is a sensational story of modern love and personal transformation.

  “Madame Torres has reimagined a youthful Colette (here called Cecile) in the infinitely seductive post-World War II period in Paris, where she moves like a sleeping princess through the perverse fairy tales of man-made cafe society. By Cecile is a sharply perceptive novel.”

  —Joan Schenkar, author of The Talented Miss Highsmith

  WOMEN’S BARRACKS

  Tereska Torres

  Afterword by Judith Mayne

  Interview with the author by Joan Schenkar

  eISBN: 9781558617148 | ISBN: 9781558614949

  The grim setting of an urban military barracks—with its freezing dorms, rationed food, and unbecoming regulation underwear—became the setting for one of the steamiest novels of its time and the first-ever lesbian pulp. Written from the point of view of one of the younger and more innocent girl soldiers, Women’s Barracks reflects Tereska Torres’s experiences in the Free French forces assembled under General Charles de Gaulle. Condemned in 1952 for its “artful appeals to sensuality, immorality, filth, perversion, and degeneracy” by the House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials, this novel became an underground phenomenon, selling four million copies in the US and many more abroad.

  “As a lesbian historian, as a citizen of a war-torn world, simply as a reader, I found this 1950 novel, considered obscene in its own time, moving, arousing, and deeply interesting.”

  —Joan Nestle, author of A Restricted Country

  “Women’s Barracks stands not only as a classic in our literary heritage, but as a fascinating view of the intensity and resilience of the lesbian spirit.”

  —Radclyffe, author of Sheltering Dunes

  TERESKA TORRES’s Women’s Barracks is widely considered to be the first lesbian pulp novel. It is based on her own experiences as a young woman in the Free French forces during WWII. Condemned in 1952, the novel became an underground phenomenon, selling over four million copies. Torres went on to write many more bestselling novels in France, which were often brought to an American audience by her husband, the author Meyer Levin. Torres lives in Paris, where she is completing her memoirs.

  The Feminist Press promotes voices on the margins of dominant culture and publishes feminist works from around the world, inspiring personal transformation and social justice. We believe that books have the power to shift culture, and create a society free of violence, sexism, homophobia, racism, cis-supremacy, classism, sizeism, ableism and other forms of dehumanization. Our books and programs engage, educate, and entertain.

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