25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION Nadine Pagan's dyke sister Jane wants to find her. Her lover Rose wants to marry her. And her mother Fay wants to forget her. All Nadine wants is to stop the buzzing in her head. Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound follows Nadine's (née Morningstar) adventures as she escapes from her incendiary Jewish family into the lesbian town of New Chelm--and far beyond. This is the novel Isaac Bashevis Singer might have written if he'd been a lesbian with a keen eye for contemporary middle-class assimilation. It's Jewish magical lesbian realism, a good story, and a dynamic piece of writing. Includes an all new introduction by the author Judith Katz is the author of two published novels, The Escape Artist and Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound , which won the 1992 Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Fiction. She teaches cultural studies and literature courses for the University of Minnesota's Center for Jewish Studies.

"Gillian Freeman is among the finest contemporary novelists." - Brigid Brophy, New Statesman "It is altogether an astonishing novel for a young woman to have written. The story describes, convincingly and touchingly, the brief, sensual affair ... between a sailor on leave and a young schoolteacher ... their frank sexual attraction for each other is given a warm and compelling context ... a novel that has the ring of truth." - Times Literary Supplement "This novel is successful in an honest and unpretentious way." - The Guardian When Freda Mackenzie, an eminently respectable young schoolteacher with a stockbroker father and a background of tennis, riding and university, meets Derek Smith, a big blond sailor from the East End of London, she tells herself that she sees him only as a challenge, that she simply enjoys watching his reactions as she introduces him to good food, good films, good music. But their friendship develops into something more: Derek awakens in Freda a latent sensuality, a passionate joy in the act of love she has never before experienced or even imagined. As their affair becomes more intense, Freda and Derek find themselves torn between their feelings for each other and their very different social backgrounds-and they have only three short weeks in which to make their choice . . . Critically acclaimed on its initial publication and later recognized by critic Mary Cadogan as "considerably in advance of its time", Gillian Freeman's first novel, The Liberty Man (1955), returns to print for the first time in almost 40 years. This edition features a new introduction by Edward Thorpe and a reproduction of the original jacket art.

As with the first volume of Transcendent, Lethe Press has worked with a wonderful editor to select the best work of genderqueer stories of the fantastical, stranger, horrific, and weird published the prior year. Featuring stories by Merc Rustad, Jeanne Thornton, Brit Mandelo, and others, this anthology offers time-honored tropes of the genre--from genetic manipulation to zombies, portal fantasy to haunts--but told from a perspective that breaks the rigidity of gender and sexuality. A winner for the Lambda Literary Award for Best Transgender Fiction

A lesbian parolee re-integrates into life in DC in a dark comedy about the dangers and delights of humiliation. Desiree Schulman is home from federal prison--almost. When Des returns to Washington, DC under "conditional release," she wants three things: to repair her relationships, to practice humility, and to stay out of prison. So she reconnects with her local sadomasochists' group, and pursues an elusive ex. She takes a state-mandated job cleaning (and judging) other people's houses, flings a few prayers at whatever Higher Power might be listening, and spends her group therapy trying to justify her happy childhood to the women of her halfway house. But Des's downwardly-mobile skid through the gentrifying city is more dangerous than she realizes. Behind a high fence in wealthy Upper Northwest, a cult is preying on vulnerable women. And when Des discovers their secret, she'll have to find out whether she's willing to risk her own freedom for somebody else's. Set in the shadow of the 2016 elections, Punishment is a story about all the ways we surrender: the ridiculous ways and the sublime ways and the sad sordid ways; the ways which damage us and the ways which may, if we're lucky, heal us.

For more than five decades, with relentless candor, biting wit, and striking imagery, Bruce Benderson's fiction has celebrated the warped beauty of our megalopolises, including their clashes between the classes and their subcultures of sex and drugs. Oppressed but flamboyant, the voices of his subterranean worlds have become just too intense to be ignored. Now, for the first time, all his short texts, including 21 never before published, appear together in the same volume. Included is one of the first post-Stonewall coming out stories, written in 1970, decades before such narratives developed into a full genre. This, then, is the complete and definitive Bruce Benderson reader. Benderson's most well-known book, The Romanian: Story of an Obsession, was awarded the prestigious Prix de Flore in its French edition. Other publications include the essay collection Sex and Isolation, the short story collection Pretending to Say No, and the novels Pacific Agony and User.