Laura Chester

Softcover,  208 pages ISBN: 0-87685-847-7 1991, $13.95 Bitches Ride Alone Stories by Laura Chester In the linked short stories of Bitches Ride Alone, Laura Chester returns to her signature subject matter with headlong, unguarded candor. Chronicling girlhood crushes, bittersweet love affairs, and erotic fantasies, Chester’s narrator, a nameless divorcee in her middle forties, examines the tension between the idealism of womanly desire and the shortcomings of reality. The titles of the stories say it all: “First-base Boyfriend,” “The Never Enough Club,” “How Not to Seduce Your Therapist,” “The Art of Kissing at the Age of Forty.” Chester’s courage, honesty, and humor are here in abundance and are a healing balm to every woman’s romantic misery. “Chester looks unflinchingly at loss and alienation . . . but she also offers hope.” ––Los Angeles Times “It is the exuberance of this collection that is its most charming feature. Loose and lanky, the prose seems to thrive on rawness and recklessness . . . Chester’s best writing comes from a radical girlhood—curious, impatient, impetuous, and alive.” ––Review of Contemporary Fiction “Chester invents a free-flowing, associative style, at once a hypnotic literary technique, a liberating ethic, and a feminine metaphysic, desire pulsating in the everyday.” ––American Book Review Softcover, 232 pages ISBN: 0-87685-775-6 1989 $14.95 The Stone Baby A Novel by Laura Chester Infidelity and sexual obsession, birth and loss – these are the themes of Laura Chester’s frank and powerful novel The Stone Baby. Julia Chapin is an aspiring painter in her mid-thirties, blessed with three sons and a circle of good women-friends. She is also bored with her marriage, and finds escape, release, and a kind of controlled recklessness through riding horses. Her weekend afternoons at a Western Massachusetts stable bring an encounter with Philip Mercato, a smooth-talking divorced Manhattan stockbroker. Julia is swept away on the wings of money and charm to a world of compulsive sensuality––a world that comes to a sudden, sobering end when she finds that she is pregnant. Laura Chester precisely charts the evolution of a doomed relationship, from first erotic rush to shattering disillusionment. Along the way, she explores the ways that women support one another in difficult times. “The best thing of its kind since Elizabeth Bowen. If Bowen were still alive, she might envy the frankness with which Chester is able to write about sex, childbirth, and the gut-tugging bond between mother and child.” —San Francisco Chronicle   Softcover,  236 pages ISBN: 0-87685-747-0 1988, $16.95 In the Zone: New & Selected Writing by Laura Chester In the Zone is a Laura Chester’s own selection of poems, prose poems, and stories from 1970 to 1988, the first two decades of her career. Erotic, dreamlike, and unashamed, they constitute the personal history of a literary sensualist. Laura Chester writes of this early work: "I've always understood that a poem, or any piece of writing, has something of its own life, its own force, but now I see that it can also become part of a greater upward or downward spiral. I do not want to limit myself to the perpendicular of intellectualism, nor the squiggles of siren stuff, but I do want to be receptive to the unpredictable curve, letting a wholeness come through me, thought, word ,and feeling inseparable, inspiration firmly linked to the craft-work of shaping. Writing for me has got to be grand." “A fine achievement. I am delighted.” —Carl Rakosi “This is powerful stuff, often beautifully obscure, with undercurrents that constantly tug at the shoals of sanity.” —Booklist “Her stories and poems are vivid . . . moving . . . engrossing. As a matter of fact, her writing is addictive.” —Small Press Review