Riverfinger Women: A Novel

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Open Road Media, Jan 14, 2014 - Fiction - 197 pages
Award-winning author Elana Dykewomon’s “wonderful” debut novel about lesbian life in America during the social upheaval of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Adrienne Rich).
 Written when she was just twenty-four years old, Riverfinger Women is Elana Dykewomon’s beloved, intimate coming-of-age novel about Inez and her circle of friends—the Riverfinger women—struggling to find themselves amid the changing social mores of the Civil Rights era. Inez has known she was a lesbian since childhood, and while moving between Highland, her boarding school, and her friends’ Greenwich Village apartment, she experiences longing and disappointment, friendship and romance, and her first real relationship, with schoolmate Abby. Along with their experimental and outgoing friend Peggy, Inez and Abby graduate from Highland and move into adulthood, confronting the prejudices of the larger world as they go.
Told in an engrossing interweaving narrative, Riverfinger Women explores the characters’ brushes with sexual violence, prostitution, drugs, love, and, ultimately, happiness amid the thrills and challenges of lesbian life during the second women’s liberation movement.
 
Originally published in 1974, this groundbreaking novel was honored with the 2018 Lee Lynch Classic Award.
  
 

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Contents

Chapter 1
Afterword
About the Author
Copyright

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About the author (2014)

DIVElana Dykewomon has published seven award-winning books foregrounding lesbian heroism, including the classics Riverfinger Women (1974), Beyond the Pale (1997), and Risk (2009). A former editor of the international lesbian feminist journal Sinister Wisdom, she is the recipient of the Lambda Literary Award and the Publishing Triangle’s Ferro-Grumley Award. In 2009 she received the Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelists’ Prize, awarded by the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival. Dykewomon and her partner live in Oakland, California./div

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