Kathleen Collins’s (1942–88) short stories, written in the 1960s and 70s, were unpublished in her lifetime. Alice Walker, then an editor at Ms. magazine, wrote Collins a generous rejection note but it took a posthumous screening of Collins’s film Losing Interest last year, organized by her daughter, for her prose to reach an audience.
This first published collection of stories offers an important perspective on themes of racial identity, sexual freedom and erotic fulfilment.
Brad Watson’s second novel is both charming and disquieting. The Miss Jane of the title is a baby born with a genital birth defect which Watson reveals by degrees. Notions of how anatomy constitutes identity might now seem modish, but Watson sets his novel in rural Mississippi during the early twentieth century and was inspired by the real-life example of his great-aunt, who died in 1975. This historical setting is crucial: the defect, which the reader can gradually piece together as being persistent cloaca, could now be operated on, but Watson is interested in exploring how a woman isolated by this abnormality could learn to live.