LoveReading Says
As author Jewelle Gomez says in her Foreword, The Gilda Stories is a lesbian-feminist interpretation of vampirism. It’s also a remarkable novel that dances with life and ideas — dazzling, radical and alive with exquisite story-telling.
In Louisiana in 1850, mysterious Gilda takes in a young girl who’s escaped enslavement. Gilda’s Woodards house is a place of mystery to the girl — she’d “never seen white women such as these before, and it was frightening to not know where she fit in.” What’s more, the women here “freely expressed their views on politics and economics: what slavery was doing to the South, who was dominating politics.” They also dress in men’s clothing, travel at night, are reputed to be witches, and can hear people’s deepest thoughts. In addition, they offer the girl a glimpse of another life, of freedom, and free will, and so she chooses the life Gilda offers her: “In choosing you must pledge yourself to choose only life, never bitterness or cruelty.” On making her choice, the girl drinks blood from Gilda’s breast, and inherits her name when Gilda exchanges her life for the girl’s.
Feeling nothing but “excitement about the unknown that lay ahead, and comfort with her new life”, the new Gilda spends the next 200 years searching for ways to exist, desiring women and thirsting for blood as she slips through brothels, jazz clubs, gold rush bars, and Black women’s suffrage meetings. Wildly inventive, sensuously written, and rich with ideas and energy, The Gilda Stories world is remarkable.
Joanne Owen
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The Gilda Stories Synopsis
Before Buffy, before Twilight, before Octavia Butler's Fledgling, there was The Gilda Stories, now as a new Penguin Classics hardcover, a Penguin Speculative Fiction Special
A Penguin Classic Hardcover
First published in 1991, The Gilda Stories is a groundbreaking speculative fiction vampire novel that begins in 1850s Louisiana, where a young Gilda escapes slavery and learns about freedom while working in a brothel. After being initiated into eternal life as one who "shares the blood" by two women there, Gilda spends the next two hundred years searching for a place to call home. Taking only blood as sustenance, killing as a last resort, Gilda moves through the centuries up to the dystopian future of 2050. Gomez's classic, with a Black lesbian heroine, has endured as an auspiciously prescient book in its explorations of Blackness, radical ecology, redefinitions of family, and the erotic potential of the vampire story.
Penguin Speculative Fiction Special is a hardcover series of horror, science fiction, fantasy, and more published by Penguin Classics. Featuring custom endpapers, specially commissioned cover art, and introductions by scholars and notable figures, these collectible editions celebrate classics that invite us to ask, "What if?" and that, through bold imagination, alternative visions, and magical realms, transform our perception of our world.
About This Edition
Jewelle Gomez Press Reviews
The Gilda Stories was ahead of its time when it was first published in 1991... Gomez's characters are rooted in historical reality yet lift seductively out of it, to trouble traditional models of family, identity, and literary genre and imagine for us bold new patterns. A lush, exciting, inspiring read -- Sarah Waters
Fire for the conscience and food for the soul... Jewelle Gomez's 1991 novel, The Gilda Stories, helped shape the emergence of Afro- and Indigenous futurisms -- Jay Bernard, author of Surge
The Gilda Stories is groundbreaking not just for the wild lives it portrays, but for how it portrays them - communally, unapologetically, roaming fiercely over space and time -- Emma Donoghue, author of Room
'How Long 'Til Black Future Month', asks NK Jemisin in the title of her recent short story collection. The brilliant Octavia Butler provided many profound answers, and keeping her company was Jewelle Gomez. Herdiamantine novel The Gilda Stories traces Black lesbian community from the antebellum South to technodystopian 2050, via Gilda, who escapes slavery and becomes a vampire. Meeting other queer Black, Indigenous and Latinx 'sisters in the life', Gilda develops both her compelling ethics and her swoonsome butch style, determined to survive racism, sexism, homophobia and climate crisis by loving others ? Dazed & Confused
This revolutionary classic by a pioneer in black speculative fiction will delight and inspire generations to come -- Tananarive Due
Jewelle's big-hearted novel pulls old rhythms out of the earth, the beauty shops and living rooms of black lesbian herstory, expressed by the dazzling vampire Gilda. Her resilience is a testament to black queer women's love, power, and creativity. Brilliant! -- Joan Steinau Lester
Uses the vampire story as a vehicle for a re-telling of American history in which the disenfranchised finally get their say. Her take on queerness, community, and the vampire legend is as radical and relevant as ever -- Michael Nava
I still feel a connection to Gilda: her tenacity, her desire for community, her insistence on living among humanity with all its flaws and danger. The Gilda Stories are both classic and timely. Gilda emphasizes the import of tenets at the crux of black feminism while her stories ring with the urgency of problems that desperately need to be resolved in our current moment -- Theri A. Pickens, author of Black Madness
Its focus on a black lesbian who possesses considerable agency througout the centuries, and its commentary on gender and race, remain significant and powerful ? Publishers Weekly
Gilda's body knows silk, telepathy, lavender, longing, timeless love, and so much blood. With sensory, action-packed prose and a poet's eye for beauty, Jewelle Gomez gives us an empathy transfusion. This all-American novel of the undead is a life-affirming read -- Lenelle Moïse, author of Haiti Glass
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