Susan Koppelman

It's the 1930s in Texas when Charlie Bader comes of age with urges he has struggled with since childhood and does not understand. After his new bride finds him wearing her own sexy lingerie and leaves him in disgust, he tries to move on. His efforts lead him to Chicago, where he stumbles on a community of cross-dressers and begins to attend their secret soirees. When Pearl Harbor is bombed, he volunteers for the army, serving as a dentist and trying once again to leave his obsession with soft clothes behind. Instead, his wartime experiences combined with the army's faulty record-keeping lead to his reappearance in the small town of Heaven, Indiana, as Charlene. There, Charlene opens a beauty shop where Heaven's women safely share their stories and secrets as she shampoos, clips, curls, and combs their hair. Charlene deftly manages to keep her own story hidden and her sexual desires quiet until she falls in love with a female customer and her life begins to change.

A daring new anthology of short stories, "The Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe" features women's stories on the theme of women and fatness, edited by the award-winning scholar on U. S. women's short story Susan Koppelman. Spanning from the 1890s through the 1990s, this vital collection explores the many psychological and emotional tensions in women's -relationships to-and perceptions of-their physical selves. Addressing the peculiarities, the delights, and the shames of body politics that reside in the flesh, these stories of bodies that refuse to be contained deftly and astutely comment on popular notions of acceptable body types and behaviors. Whether celebrating bodies deemed transgressive or simply acknowledging that such bodies exist, these diverse literary representations of fatness render the unfettered body brilliantly, -unapologetically visible.