Esoteric, melancholy, beautifully written short stories, of which two are overtly lesbian in content.

BERTIN, SYLVIA. _The Last Innocence._ (Trans. by Marjorie Dean). N Y McGraw Hill, 1955. Story of Paula, a member of a French provincial family. "The refreshing thing is that Paula is treated as a matter of course ... that she wears trousers, hates men, etc.

is presented with no more excuse or explanation than the individual foibles of the rest of the family."

BESTER, ALFRED. _Who He?_ N. Y., Doubleday 1955, pbr Berkley 1956, (m) tct. _The Rat Race_. Tense, tightly plotted novel of split personality. The hero's housemate is a deeply sublimated h.o.m.os.e.xual who cracks up when Jake gets a girl; this episode snaps the high pitch of tightrope tension and precipitates the denouement of the novel. Excellent.

BISHOP, LEONARD. _Creep Into thy Narrow Bed._ Dial 1954, pbr Pyramid 1956. Story of a vicious abortion racket; woven into the story is the sympathetically treated story of a young lesbian's self-realization. Very good of kind.

BODIN, PAUL. _All Woman's Flesh_ (trans. from the French of Le Voyage Sentimental, by Lowell Bair.) pbo Berkley 1957.

_The Sign of Eros_ (trans. from French) Putnam 1953, pbr Berkley 1955.

Both of these involve a man's attachment to two women who have some h.o.m.os.e.xual contact, but the emphasis is heteros.e.xual, rather than lesbian.

BOLTON, ISABEL. "Ruth and Irma", ss in The New Yorker, Jan 26, 1947; also in Donald Webster Cory's _21 Variations on a Theme_.

BOTTOME, PHYLLIS. _Jane._ Vanguard, 1957. Story of a street urchin, including lesbian episodes in a girl's reformatory.

BOURDET, eDOUARD. _The Captive._ N. Y., Brentano's 1926. Drama based on a triangle-man, wife, and a woman who is winning the affections of the latter.

BOURJAILY, VANCE. _The End of My Life._ Scribner's 1947, pbr Bantam 1952, (m).

_The Violated._ Dial 1958, pbr Bantam 1959, (m).

_The Hound of Earth._ Scribner 1955, pbr Permabooks, 1956, (m).

Also includes a minor, and unsympathetic lesbian character.

BOWEN, ELIZABETH. _The Hotel._ N. Y. Dial 1928. A shy young girl sent to catch a husband at a fashionable hotel is, instead, captivated by a sophisticated woman.

BOWLES, JANE. _Two Serious Ladies._ N. Y. Knopf, 1943. The emanc.i.p.ation of an inhibited American housewife.

BOYLE, KAY. "The Bridegroom's Body" ss in _The Crazy Hunter_, Harcourt 1938, 1940. Also qpb, Beacon Press, 1958, (m).

_Gentlemen, I Address you Privately._ NY, Smith 1933, (m).

_Monday Night._ N. Y. Harcourt 1938, hcr New Directions, n.d. Brief account of a lesbian affair through the eyes of a child.

BRADLEY, MARION Z. "Centaurus Changeling" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April, 1954. Science Fiction novel; intensely emotional relationship between three wives of alien bureaucrat leads to jealousy and tragedy when the eldest, Ca.s.siana, takes an outsider into their home and makes a favorite of her.

_The Planet Savers_, in Amazing Stories, Dec. 1958, (m). Science fiction of split personality, one equivocally h.o.m.os.e.xual.

BRAND, MAX. (pseud of Frederick Faust). _The Night Horseman._ G.P.

Putnam's Sons, 1920, hcr Dodd, Mead 1952, pbr Pocket Books 1954, (m). Unusual Western story of a strange cowboy who has an almost supernatural influence on horses and other men; his foster father mysteriously declines when he leaves, makes a miraculous recovery when he returns home. Subtle and good of its kind.

BRINIG, MYRON. _The Looking Gla.s.s Heart._ Sagamore, 1958. One lesbian episode, treated vaguely. (Minority report says that nevertheless it is so clearly and well done that the book is worth anyone's reading.)

BRITAIN, SLOAN. _The Needle._ pbo Beacon Books, 1959. Overly contrived shocker about Gina, a young girl who falls simultaneously into narcotics, lesbianism, prost.i.tution and the hands of a weird couple dabbling in incest. Evening waster, rather better than most but leaves a bitter taste.

+ _First Person, Third s.e.x._ pbo Newsstand Library 1959. Very well-written novel of Paula Harman, young schoolteacher coming to terms with her life as a lesbian through bitter experience. Don't let the lurid paperback covers and blurb scare you off, this is a NOVEL-well worth hard covers and a steal at 35.

BROCK, LILYAN. _Queer Patterns._ Greenberg 1935, pbr Avon 1951, 1952. Purple-patched sloppily sentimental tale of Sheila, beautiful young actress with a perfect husband who nevertheless loses her heart to Nicoli, a stereotype lesbian complete with tuxedo. They part to avoid gossip and live unhappily ever after.

BROMFIELD, LOUIS. _The Rains Came._ N. Y. Collier 1937, pbr Bantam 1952. In a long novel of India there is a brief but important episode involving two old missionary ladies. The elder, an engaging old battleax, muses as she tucks the younger and sillier into bed that her friend had never understood why they had been driven out of the school where they had, as young girls, been teaching. Ironically, the nice old grim one is killed in a flood while the silly one remains to pester everybody.

_Mister Smith_, Harper, 1951; no pbr on record, but your editor has owned one-perhaps an "Armed Forces" edition? (m). Four men, marooned on a desert island in WW2.

+ BROPHY, BRIGID. _King of a Rainy Country._ Knopf. 1957. Poignant novel of a young girl who lives with Neale, a young male h.o.m.os.e.xual, out of wedlock. They both become enamored with a portrait of Cynthia, a girl out of the childhood of the heroine....

BROWN, WENZELL. _Prison Girl._ pbo, Pyramid, 1958. One of many books doc.u.menting in painful detail the abuses prevalent in the women's prison system, with special attention to the undeniable fact that the system breeds various s.e.xual aberrations. A few of these books are excellent. This one isn't.

BROWNRIGG, GAWEN. _Star Against Star._ N. Y., Macaulay, 1936. Story of a girl conditioned from childhood to lesbian affairs, first by an overly seductive mother, then by a school friend. The book has the doom-ridden atmosphere of its day, and is emotional and somewhat over-written.

BURNS, VINCENT G. _Female Convict._ Macaulay 1934, pbr Pyramid 1959. More women in prison and the unfortunate relationships developing among them.

BURT, STRUTHERS. _Entertaining the Islanders._ N. Y. Scribners, 1933. Sophisticated, satirical, novel in which a man becomes aware that his ex-sweetheart has been captivated by another woman.

+ BUSSY, DOROTHY. _Olivia._ (by Olivia). Wm. Sloane a.s.sociates, 1949, Berkley pbr 1955, 1957, 1958, 1959. An English schoolgirl, sent to boarding school in Paris, becomes an unwitting third party to a long-standing affair between Julie and Cara, the two schoolmistresses. Julie's response to the girl, and Cara's jealousy, and suicide, form the main events of the story, which is told with delicate restraint, after a retrospect of many years, as Olivia, now herself a lesbian, has come to understand the procession of events.

CAIN, JAMES M. _Serenade._ Knopf 1937, pbr Signet ca. 1953, (m).

CAINE, HALL. _The Bondsman._ R.F. Fenno & Co, ca. 1890; other editions available, frequently very cheap secondhand. Called a "Modern Saga", this is laid in 18th-Century Iceland. Two half-brothers, Jason the Red and Michael Sunlocks, sons of the same man by different mothers, grow up knowing of one another's existence, but unknown to each other personally. Through a series of saga-like coincidences, they fall in love with the same woman, and are eventually exiled together to the sulphur mines-Iceland's prison colony-still unaware of each other's real ident.i.ty. There Jason undergoes a psychological and emotional upheaval which can only be described as "falling in love" with Michael, who is still known to him only as Prisoner A-25, not as his hated brother. This story is probably more explicit, emotionally, than anything written before the 20th century and the freedom given by Freud to the emotions of novelists. Recommended.

_The Deemster._ Rand McNally, 1888, Chicago; D. Appleton, 1888; numerous other editions, (m). A glorified friendship between two cousins ends in murder.

CALDWELL, ERSKINE. _Tragic Ground._ Little, Brown & Co, 1944, pbr Signet 1948, fco.

CAPOTE, TRUMAN. _Breakfast at Tiffany's._ Random House 1958, pbr Signet 1959. In the story of a promiscuous, rather pathetic girl, a s.a.d.i.s.tic lesbian neighbor brings on violent events. Everything very subtle and indirect.

_Other Voices, Other Rooms._ Random House 1948, pbr Signet 1959.

Young boy slowly falling under the influence of a decadent uncle who is a transvest.i.te. Macabre.

CARCO, FRANCIS. _Depravity._ pbo Berkley 1957.

_Infamy._ pbo Berkley 1958.

Both of these books hint at lesbianism on the cover blurbs, but are, rather, highly risque French novels with brief, irrelevant and heteros.e.xually oriented contact between women characters strictly for voyeuristic effect.

CARPENTER, EDWARD. _Iolaus_; _an Anthology of Friendship._ N. Y., Albert & Charles Boni, 1935, (m). Listed as "the first of its kind", this is said also to be "very vague and old-fashioned."

+ CASAL, MARY. _The Stone Wall. An Autobiography._ Chicago, Eyncourt Press, 1930. In casual, conversational and entirely frank form, a woman born in 1865 (and therefore, at the time of writing, in her sixties) tells the story of her entire life as a lesbian. With the exception of "slightly autobiographical"-and always greatly disguised-fiction, this is probably the earliest such memoir in the literature. The writing is highly competent and professional, (subtly denying the author's insistence that she was not a writer;) and filled with most interesting revelations about the lesbian world of New York and Paris at the turn of this century. Unfortunately the book is rare and expensive, but it stands alone as a cla.s.sic of its kind.

CHAMALES, TOM T. _Go Naked in the World._ N. Y. Scribners 1959. Nick Stratton, wounded veteran, returns to find that his girl friend is a call-girl and a lesbian.

CHANDLER, RAYMOND. _The Big Sleep._ Knopf 1939, pbr Pocket Books 1950, and others. (m). The bizarre murder of a h.o.m.os.e.xual hoodlum, and the interrogation of his boy friend, form important sequences in this hard-boiled murder mystery.

CHEEVER, JOHN. "Clancy in the Tower of Babel", ss in _The Enormous Radio_, Funk 1953, pbr Berkley 1958, (m).

+ CHRISTIAN, PAULA. _The Edge of Twilight._ pbo Crest 1959.

Airline stewardess Val, in an alcoholic haze, allows herself to make love to a young girl friend, Toni. Fearing her own response to this "abnormal" love, she redoubles her promiscuous sleeping-around, but the girls end up together. The treatment, though sensational, is honest and constructive; the book will win no literary prizes, but whatever the reader's sympathies and prejudices, he will approve the stand that happy adjustment to love and affection-even h.o.m.os.e.xual-is a more constructive solution than promiscuity. Very good of its kind.