books

Gay Community News recommends the following reading..

BISEXUAL LIVES

Written to fill a gap in available literature on bisexuality, this book contains profiles of seven women and five men with a lot of information to boot on a myriad number of subjects.

From OFF Pink Publishing, price £3.75.

THE CELLULOID CLOSET

by Vito Russo.

Russo was honoured last month by the Hetrick-Martin Institute (formerly the Institute for the Protection of Lesbian and Gay Youth) in New York for his work as a film historian and social activist. The Celluloid Closet was revised last year with over 100 new entries added. More than just a chronology of gay characters in film, this book remains the only one of its kind to date spanning 80 years of mainstream film-making.

Harper and Row 1987 (Revised edition), pb. £9.40.

LYN: A STORY OF A PROSTITUTE

by June Levine and Lyn Madden.

Published last year Lyn is the reallife story of one woman's life as a prostitute in Dublin. Spanning some twenty years, much of Lyn's life will be known to readers from the newspapers' reports about her former lover and pimp and his psychopathic behaviour.

However, this is one courageous woman's viewpoint, recounted painfully and with honesty.

Attic Press 1987, 267 pp. pb. £5.40.

THE SWIMMING POOL LIBRARY

by Alan Hollinghurst.

A novel set in pre-AIDS London. At times grimly realistic, Gay's the Word Review described it as "a world in which a golden age gives way to corruption and men (there are no women in this novel) become more cynical with age. . . For all the differences between then and now, the characters behave in similar ways whatever time they live in. .. The differences are only a matter of style."

Chatto and Windus, hb. £12.95.

SOUTH RIDING

by Winifred Holtby.

A memorable evocation of a Yorkshire landscape, originally published in 1936 and reissued as a Virago Modern Classic last January.

 Winifred Holtby was a prolific writer, critic, feminist and pacifist and South Riding remains her best remembered work. A fascinating indictment of social injustice. Virago Modern Classics 1988, pb. £4.30.