Byline: ERIC FEBER THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT BEST-SELLING author Rita Mae Brown is coming to Chesapeake Thursday, but no one's sure if she'll bring along the ''co-author'' of her popular mysteries. If she does, Chesapeake public library officials will have to buy kitty...

...

On the music scene, the warm humor and exquisite vocal flourishes of the eclectic, electrifying Barbara Brussell are causing a power outage down at the Metropolitan Room in Chelsea. For the next four Thursdays at 10 p.m. she’s celebrating some of the women who bucked...

Rita Mae Brown is as subversive as apple pie. Her favorite author, according to the flyleaf of Six of One, is Mark Twain. It doesn't surprise me a bit. Imagine, if you will, Tom Sawyer, only smarter; Huckleberry Finn, only foulmouthed, female, and lesbian, and you have an idea of Molly Bolt, heroine of Rubyfruit Jungle. This largely autobiographical first novel … [features] an exuberantly raunchy style and the toughest heroine this side of Mae West. The book was funny, explosive, shocking ...

[Six of One] is in large part dialogue, and Brown, like many of her colleagues, favors rapid-fire witticism. Unfortunately she uses blanks, as for instance: "Your glasses got so many rhinestones on them, when the sun hits you, people are blinded by the light." The wise-cracks are fast enough, but no sooner sent off than they stop, drop, fizzle and fade into the next spurious remark, leaving the reader only bewildered, and after a very few pages annoyed. Clearly [Brown is] a devotee of the Mari...

Rita Mae Brown's [In Her Day] disappointed me, despite my pleasure in reading of places I know and struggles I have lived—as well as in reading a story in which lesbianism, while an important part of the characters' lives, is a given, and not itself the central conflict…. My disappointment has two sources—one, a desire, simply, for more of the novelist's skill: greater differentiation between one character's voice and another's; more scenic embodiment ...