Reviews
Interviews, essays and personal reminiscences of John Preston,a man whose career spanned the industry. Works by Lars Eighner, Pat Califi a, Michael Bronski, Joan Nestle, and others.

Customer Comments
Average Customer Review: Number of Reviews: 1

A reader from New York, NY , August 10, 1997
Good book for people who think erotica is also literature
A great look at how this extraordinary porn writer influenced his peers, through their own words. The book includes fiction, essays, and true stories that brought me to tears, laughter, and a warm feeling between my legs. A good book for the person who understands that erotica is a literary form.

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Entertainment Weekly
What was the dark secret of Bettie Page--the curvaceous black-banged pinup goddess who titillated 1950s America with S&M poses, abandoned her career in 1957, and disappeared?... journalist Foster, in this sensationalistic, albeit scrupulously researched book, reveals that in 1979 and 1982, Page (a diagnosed schizophrenic) tried to stab several people to death and was institutionalized.... An eloquent fan, he brings ... insight into her recent revival as a sex symbol.

Synopsis
Many people know Playboy centerfold Bettie Page as America's greatest pin-up girl of the 1950s. At the height of her popularity, Bettie disappeared--some feared she had been killed by the mob, while others said she became a born-again Christian and was ashamed of her infamous bondage modeling. Here is the definitive, unauthorized biography of the Queen of Curves, revealing her struggles for fame and love and her descent into violent obsession and madness.

The author, Richard Foster richfos@richmond.infi.net , June 2, 1997
A must-read for all Bettie Page fans!
An assistant editor for Style Weekly Magazine in Richmond, Virginia, I have been researching Bettie Page's life for more than five years. I was the first journalist to contact her, ending her 40-year exile. Her summer 1992 letter to me became the basis of the first comprehensive Bettie biography -- an article I wrote for the fanzine The Betty Pages. Now I am able to tell the whole story of The Queen of Curves, including many never-before-told tales. Hope you'll enjoy it!

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Reviews
From Kirkus Reviews , May 1, 1991
Readable memoir of ``Alice,'' by day a psychologist, by night ``Mistress Jacqueline'': a dominatrix, or ``fantasy engineer''- -although ``some people call me `Goddess.' '' Rimmer (The Harrad Experiment, etc.) and Tavel started out to interview 10 or 12 porno stars to find out how they abandoned parental sexual and religious conditioning, bared their bodies, and had sex in public. They landed Mistress Jacqueline, who wanted all their time for her own story. Jacqueline is, she says, the most sought-after, highly paid dominatrix on the West Coast, and has appeared on national talk shows with one of her slaves to discuss the sensitivities at the base of B&D (bondage and discipline). Much that she tells us is unspeakable indeed, but enlightening as well. Some forms of sexual abuse she thinks truly perverse, such as rape, in which there is no bond or mutual agreement. B&D is largely acting, but sometimes with gross activities that make even Jacqueline run out of the room and heave. What keeps her servile clients returning are their bonding to her, as well as her understanding that they truly need a bitch goddess--and her leather outfits say she's just that. Outside the dungeon, Alice/Jacqueline herself is more sexually responsive in the submissive role. Her opening chapters present her as an overachieving Marjorie Morningstar in the Bronx, rebelling painfully against a dominating mother and passive father. Her four-year marriage collapsed when her no-money husband chose to do stand-up comedy and let her work. Only at graduate school, undergoing therapy, did she learn that ``nothing is wrong or bad or ugly between consenting adults'' and that her obsession with spanking fantasies was okay. Sympathetic--but rough on the stomach.

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Reviews
Synopsis
"Sir" John has been involved in the S&M, or sadomasochism, scene for over 20 years. And he has kept a record of his experiences in the form of hundreds of notes, letters, diaries, photographs, and even video tapes. This book is his story--it is a surprising history of the movement that demonstrates the tremendous variety of motives and relationships that exist within the "scene."

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Reviews
Lambda Book Report
Preston has never shied away from a vision of the redemptive potential of the erotic drive. Better than perhaps anyone in our community, Preston knows how physical joy can bridge differences and make us well.

Pat Califia
An absorbing and witty work.

Library Journal
Essential and enlightening.

Larry Townsend
Preston has made such insightful excursions into the underground of erotica that he has redefined pornography into a genuine art form.

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Amazon.com
Given the macabre and often lurid subject matter of Anne Rice's fiction, one would imagine that a good biography of her would uncover some pretty spicy details, and, in fact, Katherine Ramsland's Prism of the Night does a pretty good job of balancing analysis of Rice's work with a probing and revealing investigation of her life. Ramsland, a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University, extensively interviewed Rice for the book, and Stan Rice (Anne's poet-husband) read the manuscript. Throughout, Ramsland fulfills the promise of her introduction: "My approach combines psychological interpretation with philosophical themes. As I read the novels, I looked for qualities that transcended genre, while also developing autobiographical sketches.... This book is the result of an involved and sincere attempt to trace in her writing elements of literary creativity manifested in psychological sources." Often, close readings of the fiction are coupled with commentary about the key events (emotional, personal, literary, etc.) in Rice's life that likely impacted her characters and plots. The section on the death of Rice's daughter as it manifests in Interview with the Vampire is especially wrenching. The book will be appreciated by fans for its extensive direct citation of Rice and her closest friends and relatives, and for its diverse collection of photographs. --Patrick O'Kelley

From Kirkus Reviews , September 1, 1991
Exciting life of bestselling gothicist Anne Rice, by psychologist/philosopher Ramsland (Philosophy/Rutgers). Benefiting from Rice's input, this will have to be thought of as an ``authorized'' biography, although Ramsland is her own writer--and at times a heavy-going writer, bearing what might be called the Curse of the Jungians, an overdense working out of Rice's sea-changes and gender shiftings. Born in New Orleans and named Howard Allen, Rice has always been an outsider with strong male traits and since childhood has refused to accept victimization by dress and gender codes. Like Orson Welles, she and her three sisters were raised from infancy to be geniuses, allowed to stay up late, dabble at will and read what they wished, and skip school, all with the doting permission of their alcoholic mother, Katherine, and highly moral Catholic father, Howard. Katherine's death at 48 was the deepest blow Rice had ever experienced (alcoholism claimed many family members at that very age and might have claimed Rice as well had she and her brilliant poet-husband Stan Rice not agreed in 1979 to total abstinence)--and was followed by her daughter Michele's death from leukemia at age five. These events fed in a disguised fashion into her first successful novel, Interview with the Vampire, and into her following vampire novels, which, Ramsland shows, granted immortality to her dead mother and daughter--until Rice killed them off and arose psychically refreshed. Despite success, she writes as she wishes: Later novels were audience-losers, as were pseudonymous porno novels, until she returned to her vampire chronicles. Ramsland's study climaxes in the middle--with the deeply moving death of Michele as recaptured by Stan's electric elegy--and her later knifework on the Rice psyche and its fictions gets tiresome. Still, the book is mostly quite gripping, and deserves to hit big and probably will. (Sixteen pages of b&w photograph--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Synopsis
Now completely updated, here is the fascinating biography of the woman behind the most richly conceived "children of the night" in the history of vampire literature. Includes new material on the writing of Lasher and the filming of Interview with the Vampire. 16 pages of photos.

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