A Restricted Country: Essays and Short Stories - Softcover

Joan Nestle is one of the most powerful voices of the contemporary lesbian and gay movement. This collection of stories from her life, political essays and sex fiction offer a complex view of sex, gender and class.

Joan Nestle is one of the most powerful voices of the contemporary lesbian and gay movement. Her passionate desire to tell the truth of her own experience as a Jew, a lesbian, working class and a feminist femme has won her acclaim and vilification in equal measure. In this classic collection of stories from her life, political essays and sex fiction, she offers us a complex politics of sex, gender and class.

‘For gay people, history is a place where the body carries its own story. I would like this book to be read as history, these stories and essays to be documents of a flesh and a spirit that lived through and were changed by their times: the McCarthy fifties, the activist sixties, the institution-building of the seventies, and the renewed social struggle of the eighties. These times leave their mark on both the body and the imagination, but is the body that so often appears as the ahistorical force that we simply carry with us until, for those us born healthy, it tumbles us to the earth of restricted movement.’
(AUTHOR'S PREFACE)

‘Fuses sexual passion with political commitment and offers us images of inspiration.’
GAY COMMUNITY NEWS

‘A brave book of exquisite honesty and strength.’
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