Category - Pep

Activist Pep

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There’s a treasured shelf in my collection of mid-century teen fiction and career girl books. It holds those rare voumes in which the burgeoning civil rights movement of the sixties collides with the whitebread high school fantasies of the fifties to form a schizophrenic hybrid of the malt shoppe romance and the problem novel. It’s culture clash, Y-Teen style.

Titles include Julie’s Heritage (a black high school girl grapples with racism and dating), Why Did You Go to College Linda Warren? (good-girl Linda gets embroiled with anti-war activists during her first year of college), Lots of Love, Lucinda (Corry’s white family invites a black student from the south to stay with them and go to school in the North), Continue reading →

Bookstore Chronicles: The Power of Positive Thinking

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I had a busy day at the bookstore Tuesday. There was a box from triliteral to unpack (I want all the books in the semiotexte series — so small, so simply designed, with such apocalyptic titles) and I was entering the books in the system while customers kept interrupting me — which is good! No complaints. We like it when people buy books.

A man in town for a convention asked if we had any books on dachshunds. No, I said, after conscientiously doing a keyword check, was he a dachshund fan? he wasn’t, his wife was. But stronger than a fan she was…”obsessed?” I suggested. He bought a psychedelic card. Continue reading →

The Queen of Pep

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Lenora Mattingly Weber

Once upon a time I was attempting to summarize my books for a friend of my brother’s while my niece and the friend’s two kids ran around my brother’s living room wreaking havoc.

In the midst of my long-winded dissertation on lesbian pulp fiction, its historical context, my attempts to reimagine it, etc, my brother looked up from his iPhone and interrupted. Continue reading →

Single Girl Geneaology

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The recent death of Helen Gurley Brown has had me dusting off my copy of Sex and the Single Girl for yet another pleasurable reread. It’s always a happy experience to leaf through my disintegrating paperback, contemplating the advice to drink my “serenity cocktail” on one page (among the many other things HGB anticipated was the jamba juice craze) and wear man-pleasing “slinky black” the next. As good friend and fellow-writer Lynn Peril puts it, “She was so right — and she was so wrong!” Continue reading →

The Real Find

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You’ve gone away for the weekend. You’re a tourist, on vacation. You’re wandering around, eating fudge and salt-water taffy, looking at the historic buildings, trying to decide if the shape in the water is a seal or a rock. When you get back to your hotel, you look up the local used bookstore. “Let’s stop by, before we go kayaking,” you might say to your companion. This is why: Continue reading →