April Publications

From romantic mores and butch-femme dynamics to extraordinary coincidences worthy of Sophocles, Leslea Newman sketches still more aspects of lesbian life in the 11 short stories of She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not, her follow-up to Girls Will Be Girls. A teenage girl is just becoming aware of her own attraction to other girls when she catches her father in a pink nightgown, dabbing his lashes with mascara and singing along to "I Feel Pretty." A woman tries to muddle through the days after just having lost her partner in a freak accident (her lover was pushing a woman with a baby out of the way of an oncoming car). Though the plot turns won't surprise, Newman's warmth and wry wit should once again charm fans. (Alyson, $14.95 paper 328p ISBN 1-55583-701-8)

The fine-spun, meditative stories in Deborah Cumming's debut collection, The Descent of Music, capture a generation of women who forged careers and raised children in the '60s and '70s, and are left to wonder—what now? At a 25th Peace Corps reunion, a woman and her former lover muse about what has become of their activist spirit—and reminisce about his motorcycle, which rivaled her for his affections. An elderly woman who has recently installed her husband in a nursing home revels in the eerie pleasures of solitude. A cosmopolitan New Yorker and former civil rights lawyer ponders her strained relationship with her "churchy" grown daughter living in Milwaukee. Some of the subject matter is familiar, but Cumming, a former teacher and Thai translator, keeps sentimentality at bay with carefully wrought prose and stark honesty. (Plum Branch Press [P.O. Box 5104, Harrisburg, Pa. 17110-0104], $13 paper 160p ISBN 0-9702720-1-4)

"Suddenly, alongside and inseparable from his perception of rest, as similar to rest as a synonym, he felt time slipping by, and the dead hour and so much, so very much silence already wasted." An almost torturously detailed anatomy of insomnia, Sleep, by Sicilian novelist Michele Spina (1923—1990), author of West of the Moon, traces the elliptical ramblings and drunken prowlings of a narrator desperate for some soporific thought or vision to put him out of his misery. The heady meditations are set against a surreal nocturnal world of whores, cafe bars, dwarves and bureaucrats the man encounters in his wanderings. Innovative but amorphous, the book, which Spina completed just before his death, may find fans among the Dalkey Archive set. (Dufour, $19.95 paper 128p ISBN 0-8023-1334-5)

Luminaries of the 19th century mingle in Baden-Baden, the summer playground of writers and royalty, in Earrings, Eric Koch's latest historical novel (after the Weimar Republic—focused The Man Who Knew Charlie Chaplin). Amid such a rich milieu, Koch reimagines the life of his grandfather, Robert Koch—a man who became "one of the most eminent jewelers in Europe"—as he tries to gain fortune and favor. Baths, performances, parties, birthdays and orgies: Koch chronicles people real and imagined, and scenes historical and fantastical, in lush detail and intelligent prose. (Mosaic Press [4500 Witmer Industrial Estates, PMB 145, Niagara Falls, N.Y. 14305-1386], $15 paper 200p ISBN 0-88962-775-4)

A clerk in a London photo agency, 20-something Lizzie is trapped in an unhappy affair with her compulsively philandering married boss. For Lizzie, the likably neurotic heroine of Polly Samson's Out of the Picture, everything that's wrong with her life seems to lead back to her father, who abandoned the family when she was small and continues to obsess her. Samson's debut novel (which follows the story collection Lying in Bed) is a finely crafted diversion, but if there are no wrong notes, there's also not much that sets these characters apart from the distant parents and mournful young women who populate so many post—Mona Simpson coming-of-age novels. (Virago [Trafalgar Square, dist.], $12 paper 248p ISBN 1-86049-864-7)