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الاستماع والقراءة

Olive Higgins Prouty

This pulp classic of motherhood and money introduced the immortal character portrayed on film by Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Midler—“a feminist gem” (Michael Bronski).

An ambitious woman from working-class roots, Stella sets her sights on marrying rich—and hits a bullseye. But her unshakable crudeness becomes too much for her husband. When he leaves her, she keeps their daughter Laurel. And now Stella sets her sights one again—this time, on giving her daughter the life she could never achieve for herself.

Originally published in 1923, this epic tale inspired the first radio soap opera, a Broadway play, and multiple films, including the Oscar-nominated 1937 movie starring Barbara Stanwyck and the 1990 movie Stella starring Bette Midler. Stella Dallas is a razor-sharp critique of our societal obsession with the judgment of mothers, offering cultural commentary that is still shockingly relevant nearly one hundred years after its initial publication.

The Feminist Press at CUNY

Femmes Fatales

Stella Dallas

Vera Caspary

A husband falls into a psychological spiral in a novel by the author of Laura, “an expert at suspense and suspicion” (The New York Times).

When Fletcher marries Elaine, his second wife, nineteen years his junior, he can't imagine a more passionate union. Then an illness destroys his confidence, and all he can picture is her next affair. He keeps a secret diary of his fantasized suspicions, making his impending suicide look like murder...

 With what Graham Greene once called her “devilish cunning,” Vera Caspary reveals, with sure psychological insight, the strange desires that hide in the hearts of seemingly respectable people. Out of a web of love, jealousy, guilt, and hate, she has woven one of her most suspenseful thrillers.

“Caspary writes emotive entertainments, part romance, part suspense, about women destined to kill or doomed to die.”—Kirkus Reviews

“A beautiful job.”—The Boston Herald
The Man Who Loved His Wife is part of the Femmes Fatales series, featuring the best of women’s writing in the classic pulp genres of the mid-20th century. From mystery to hard-boiled noir to taboo lesbian romance, these rediscovered queens of pulp offer subversive perspectives on a turbulent era with such titles as Now, Voyager; Stella Dallas; Bunny Lake is Missing; The Girls in 3-B; and more.

The Man Who Loved His Wife

“You must read Bedelia”, the seductive black-widow thriller by the author of the classic film noir, Laura (The New York Times).

Charlie Horst has returned with his new bride, Bedelia, to his family home in Connecticut. Indulgently infatuated, Charlie is the luckiest man alive. What’s not to love about Bedelia? She’s gorgeous and complacent. She’s also a gracious and ideal party host—luscious and decorative in blue velvet. 

And in public, she plays the part of worshipful wife to perfection. In private, even more so. Who can blame Charlie for overlooking her little deceptions? Or for not paying any mind to her contradictory claims about her past? When Charlie falls ill due to a freak poisoning, Charlie knows that Bedelia will be right his side, watching him closely. But who’s watching Bedelia?

“Vera Caspary wrote thrillers—but not like any other author of her time, male or female. Her specialty was a specific type that she pioneered—the psycho thriller” (Huffington Post) and this “sinister entertainment” (The New Yorker), is Caspary at “her most chilling” (SistersinCrime. com). Filmed in 1946, and starring Margaret Lockwood, it’s “a tour de force of psychological suspense … Desperate Housewives meets Double Indemnity in Bedelia” (Liahna Armstrong, President Emeritus, Popular Culture Association).

Bedelia

The iconic American melodrama that inspired the 1943 cult classic film starring Bette Davis. “Charlotte Vale a timeless and very sophisticated Cinderella. ” —Patricia Gaffney, New York Times bestselling author

“Don’t let’s ask for the moon! We have the stars!”

The film Now, Voyager concludes with these famous words, which reaffirmed Bette Davis’s own stardom and changed the way Americans smoked cigarettes. But few fans of this rich story know its source. Olive Higgins Prouty’s 1941 novel provides a rich, complex portrait of the inner life of its protagonist and the society she inhabits. Over half a century later, it still offers fresh and quietly radical takes on psychiatric treatment, traditional family life, female desire, and women’s agency.

Boston blueblood Charlotte Vale has led an unhappy, sheltered life. Dowdy, repressed, and pushing forty, Charlotte finds salvation in the unlikely form of a nervous breakdown, placing her at a sanitarium, where she undergoes treatment to rebuild her ravaged self-esteem and uncover her true intelligence and charm.

Femmes Fatales restores to print the best of women’s writing in the classic pulp genres of the mid-20th century. From mystery to hard-boiled noir to taboo lesbian romance, these rediscovered queens of pulp offer subversive perspectives on a turbulent era.

“Like the film it inspired, Olive Higgins Prouty’s Now, Voyager is as striking for the conventions it bucks as for the ones it embraces: a vivid reminder of a time when people crossed the ocean in liners and wore hats, and a hymn to an American ideal of social, moral, and emotional independence. ” —David Leavitt, author of Shelter in Place

Now, Voyager

Gypsy Rose Lee

This encore performance by the author of The G-String Murders is simply “one of the greatest mysteries ever written” (Philadelphia Daily News).

It’s supposed to be a quiet honeymoon getaway for celebrated stripper Gypsy Rose Lee and Biff Brannigan, ex-comic and ex-Casanova of the Burly Q circuit, settled as they are in a cozy trailer built for two. If you don’t count Gypsy’s overbearing mother, a monkey act, and Gee Gee, a. k. a. the Platinum Panic. Not to mention the best man found shot to death in the bathtub. Strippers are used to ballyhoo, but this time it’s murder.

Leave it to Gypsy and her latest scandal to draw a crowd: Biff’s burnt-out ex-flame, a sleazy dive owner with a Ziegfeld complex, a bus-and-truck circus troupe, and a local Texas sheriff randy for celebrities. But when another corpse turns up with a knife in his back, Gypsy fears that some rube is dead set on pulling the curtain on her bump and grind. She’s been in the biz long enough to know this ghastly mess is just a tease of things to come.

Mother Finds a Body

Femmes Fatales restores to print the best of women’s writing in the classic pulp genres of the mid-20th century. From hard-boiled noir to taboo lesbian romance, these rediscovered queens of pulp offer subversive perspectives on a turbulent era. 