Harlow Smith Postcards: Icons in Black and White
by Stephanie Dickinson

In this dazzling sequence of vignettes, Stephanie Dickinson highlights the darker aspect of a high-octane existence and illuminates the interior worlds of Jean Harlow and Bessie Smith. Imagine becoming the star you admire and finding out how it hurts.

Rising from the wreckage of poverty, ignorance, and sexual predation, the women’s lives presented here in lyrical scenes reveal extraordinary truths. Despite being dug out of the deep past, women today continue to face the same demons in different costumes. Dickinson’s latest book will shake you. It torpedoed my mind.

—Susan Isla Tepper, Author and Playwright

In this dazzling sequence of vignettes, Stephanie Dickinson highlights the darker aspect of a high-octane existence and illuminates the interior worlds of Jean Harlow and Bessie Smith. Imagine becoming the star you admire and finding out how it hurts. The scenes are bound together by the electric force of the writing, whether to illuminate the cost of being glamorous or facing up to the KKK with the same power Bessie had in her singing voice. All the momentary drama is here, and language whose beauty is razor sharp.The closing section eludes the spotlights, but not indignities that can befall anyone. There is a lyric force throughout the book that makes art into a sensual delight, even as the material from which it draws is rendered unflinchingly.

—David Chorton, author of Speech Scroll and Shatter the Bell in my Ear (Translations from Christine Lavant)

Stardom is not all it’s cracked up to be. Dickinson references biographical moments in the lives of Harlow and Smith and then dives deep. She delves into their inner lives revealing the pain and humiliations each of the women encountered. Part stream of consciousness, part inner monologues – we are pulled into their innermost fears and struggles. Dickinson faces the dark side head on and illuminates it.

—Maude Boylan, Actress

In "Houston Insomnia" Stephanie Dickinson demonstrates her remarkable powers of description and narration. Her intense vivid imagery and compelling characters are so enthralling they keep you riveted to the page. She is among the best prose stylists writing fiction today.

—Dorothy Friedman August, poet and non-fiction essayist