Law school, girlfriends, and career choices were all part of Raymond Tyler's life, but there were other, more terrifying issues for him to confront. Being black was tough enough, but Raymond was becoming more and more conscious of sexual feelings that he knew weren't "right." He was completely committed to Sela, his longtime girlfriend, but his attraction to Kelvin, whom he had met during his last year in law school, had become more than just a friendship. No matter how much he tried to suppress them, his feelings were deeply sexual.Fleeing to New York to escape both Sela and Kelvin, Raymond finds himself more confused than ever before. New relationships -- both male and female -- give him enormous pleasure but keep him from finding the inner peace and lasting love he so desperately desires. The horrible illness and death of a friend force Raymond, at last, to face the truth.

    In this, her thirteenth book of verse, the author of "The Dream of a Common Language" and "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" writes of war, oppression, the future, death, mystery, love and the magic of poetry.

    But I am a monster . . .' Patrick WhitePatrick White, winner of the Nobel Prize and author of more than a dozen novels and plays - including Voss, The Vivisector and The Twyborn Affair - lived an extraordinary life. David Marr's brilliant biography draws not only on a wide range of original research but also on the single most difficult and important source of all: the man himself. In the weeks before his death, White read the final manuscript, which for richness of detail, authority and balance is stunning.Throughout his exciting narrative, Marr explores the roots of White's writing and unearths the raw material of his remarkable art. He makes plain the central fact of White's life as an artist: the homosexuality that formed his view of himself as an outcast and stranger able to penetrate the hearts of both men and women. Gracefully written and exhaustively researched, Patrick White is a biography of classic excellence - sympathetic, objective, penetrating and as blunt, when necessary, as White himself.

    Enveloped in a nimbus of immorality, he if any had a way of continually provoking the cultural authorities and astounding the public with his inexhaustible creativity. Be it as a writer, commentator or painter, actor, choreographer or producer, in the course of his spectacular career he worked and quarreled often enough with all the great artists of his era, from Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Satie and Picasso to Apollinaire, Radiguet, Gide and Truffaut. But no matter what form of artistic expression Cocteau chose to use, he left his personal stamp upon it in some inimitable way. While his literary works and films are known to a wide public, Jean Cocteau's extensive oeuvre as a painter and draughtsman still holds surprises in store. This book, with over 140 illustrations, presents a broad selection of his erotic drawings from four decades, many as yet unpublished. From "Le Livre blanc", Cocteau's controversial homoerotic manifesto printed anonymously in 1928, to his works from the early 60s, the style and line-work may vary but never the theme: Cocteau's highly explicit works are devoted to one subject alone: the Eros of the male sex."As far back as I can remember, I can find traces of my love for boys. I always preferred the strong sex, which I think may legitimately be called the fair sex."With these words Jean Cocteau openly acknowledged a homosexuality that he lived out to the full, and expressed in his erotic drawings. The volume contains 140 of his most beautiful works from four decades, most of which are published here for the first time.

    Escaping from slavery in the 1850s Gilda's longing for kinship and community grows over two hundred years. Her induction into a family of benevolent vampyres takes her on an adventurous and dangerous journey full of loud laughter and subtle terror.

    Ford has been in the advance guard from his precocious beginnings in the Deep South through his experiments in lyrical surrealism in the 1940s up to his recent poetic epiphanies of Nepal.The poet William Carlos Williams once wrote that the effect of Ford's "particularly hard, generally dreamlike poetry. . .is to revive the sense and force them to re-see, re-hear, re-taste, re-smell, and generally re-value all that it was believed had been seen, heard, smelled, and generally valued."