"Girls never end and
that's their beauty; shoot one down and one even younger
pops up in her place."
—Laurie Weeks, "Debbie's
Barium Swallow" in The
New Fuck You.
Currently in its 4th printing, this LAMBDA-award
winning anthology crosses all boundaries of taste and style,
to bring together stories by writers as diverse as Sapphire,
Joan Larkin, Linda Yablonsky, Honor Moore, Carmelita Tropicana,
Dodie Bellamy, and Laurie Weeks. The book's thirty-nine contributors
cover virtually the entire range that lesbians do: having
a baby, buying heroin, watching a parent die, walking a dog.
But unlike other lesbian anthologies that either exclude
or fetishize sexuality, sex in The New Fuck You erupts
as anarchically as it does in life, rejecting all "thematic
consistency" and drawing from the new capitals of de-centered
America, from DC riot grrls to Sin City, Louisiana, to white-girl
flashbacks into a black reformatory in Ohio. More brawl than
mall, this compilation asserts a new form of female underground
culture that is as formless, interesting and as surprising
as lesbian life today.
Tasty and exciting, like getting into bed
with one writer after another, The New Fuck You includes
everything from Marilyn Hacker's heartbreakingly transcendent
poem “Cancer Winter” to Linda Yablonsky's deliciously
manic and messy “The Story of Junk.”
