Book is very good with no writing or names.

Pictorial wraps with orange stained page ends.

Not price-clipped ($0.35 price on cover). Binding: Paperbackįirst Paperback Edition, First Printing. Kudos to the editors for bringing this lost classic back into print-it never should have left us in the first place.Edition: First Thus Book Condition: Collectible - Very Good Publisher: Crest Books. The edition includes an illuminating interview with the author and an afterword by Judith Mayne that nicely contextualizes the narrative as well as the book's curious publishing history. Truly, it is a more literary novel than the lurid original cover would have one believe-its many sexual encounters invariably veer from the promise of pornography to the achingly real, and often painful, emotional excavations of these women's lives.

It is, in fact, a moving and bittersweet tale of a tight-knit community of women, their loves and losses, hopes and despairs, with a charmingly modest salaciousness that runs through to justify its 'pulp' marketing. Translated from the French (though never published in France), this heavily autobiographical tale of life in the Free French Army women's barracks in WWII London is a delicious blend of sex and melodrama that manages to be sentimental without ever becoming mawkish or campy. From mystery to hard-boiled noir to taboo lesbian romance, these rediscovered queens of pulp offer subversive perspectives on a turbulent era.įrom the Feminist Press's 'Femmes Fatales: Women Write Pulp' series comes this reissue of a long out-of-print 1950 classic, the 'first lesbian-themed pulp' novel. Women’s Barracks was banned for obscenity in several states and denounced by the House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials in 1952 as an example of how the paperback industry was “promoting moral degeneracy.” In spite of such efforts-or perhaps, in part, because of them-the novel became a record-breaking bestseller and inspired a whole new genre: lesbian pulp.įemmes Fatales restores to print the best of women’s writing in the classic pulp genres of the mid-20th century. This account of life among female Free French soldiers in a London barracks during World War II sold four million copies in the United States alone and many more worldwide. This novel-based on the author's real-life experiences-is credited as the first candidly lesbian novel, originally published in 1950, that “scandalized mid-century America” (The New York Times).Īs the Blitz rains down over London, taboos are broken, affairs start and stop, and hearts are won and lost.

Women's Barracks by Tereska Torrès