"There's no moving away from this wrenching, beautifully told story".--Los Angeles Times.

    Subsequent work asserts his place among America’s most important writers. The author’s most daring work, After the Blue Hour is narrated by a twenty-four-year-old writer named John Rechy. Fleeing a turbulent life in Los Angeles, he accepts an invitation to a private island from an admirer of his work. There, he joins Paul, his imposing host in his late thirties, his beautiful mistress, and his precocious teenage son. Browsing Paul’s library and conversing together on the deck about literature and film during the spell of evening’s “blue hour,” John feels surcease, until, with unabashed candor, Paul shares intimate details of his life. Through cunning seductive charm, he married and divorced an ambassador’s daughter and the heiress to a vast fortune. Avoiding identifying his son’s mother, he reveals an affinity for erotic “dangerous games.” With intimations of past decadence and menace, an abandoned island nearby arouses tense fascination over the group. As “games” veer toward violence, secrets surface in startling twists and turns. Explosive confrontation becomes inevitable.

    J. Rosenthal's only mission is to find himself a boyfriend and avoid setbacks like bad haircuts, bad sex, and Jewish guilt. In post-AIDS 1986, B.J.'s world has changed dramatically -- his friends and lovers are getting sick, everyone is at risk, and B.J. is panicking. Parrying high-wire wit against unbearable human tragedy, Eighty-Sixed now stands as a testament to an era. "If Woody Allen were gay and wrote novels, he'd produce something like David Feinberg's Eighty-Sixed." -- David Streitfeld, The Washington Post Book World "[Feinberg] has given us a painful story of one man coming of age in a terrifying age." -- The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) "Entertaining, harrowing, and powerfully unsensational." -- Booklist "[Eighty-Sixed] stands out for its frankness, ferocious wit, and total lack of sentimentality or self pity." -- Catherine Texier, The New York Times Book Review

    As Henry dotes on the handsome but dull-witted Toby Vogler, Toby pines for Caleb. Jessie has her own problems as the love object of director Frank Earp, whose floundering career has reduced him to staging children's plays off-off-off-Broadway. The secrets and heartaches of these many unfulfilled romances, unions, and associations unfold during the course of Caleb's bizarre birthday bash, where his pistol-packin' grandma causes even more mayhem.The heavy themes of AIDS, sexual addiction, and unrequited love are expertly blended into the mix of slick humor and satire. Bram skillfully weaves together all the outlandish characters and their even more eccentric affairs, showing how all of them have a love-hate relationship with the theater, with each other, and with their own creative impulses. At turns graceful, shrewd, and ribald, Lives of the Circus Animals is terrific entertainment, steeped in the authentic details of theater life. This talented author's laugh-out-loud dialogue, burlesque situations, and shrewd insight into the vagaries of love are sure to win him an even more extensive readership. Tom Piccirilli

    In Vanishing Rooms, the author amply demonstrates his literary promise with a compelling love story of interracial sex and urban violence set in Manhattan’s West Village in the 1970s.

    Having been fired from his job because of a sex scandal involving a student, the teacher travels to Paris under an assumed name -- that of his best friend, Herbert. In Paris, "Herbert" becomes enchanted by Stephane, a fifteen-year-old boy. As he unravels the gilded but sad childhood of Allan Stein, "Herbert" is haunted by memories of his own boyhood, particularly his odd, flamboyant mother. Moving from the late twentieth century back to the 1900s, effortlessly blending fact and fiction, Allan Stein is a charged exploration of eroticism, obsession, and identity.

    But the ensuing romance proves short-lived as Jimmy dies of an AIDS-related illness. The grieving Seamus is obliged to keep a promise to Jimmy: “Take me back the way I came.”    And so Seamus sets out by bicycle on a picaresque journey with the ashes, hoping to bring them back to Buffalo. He meets truck drivers, waitresses, college kids, farmers, ranchers, Marines, and other travelers—each one giving him a new perspective on his own life and on Jimmy’s death. When he meets and becomes involved with a young Native American man whose mother has recently died, Seamus’s grief and his story become universal and redemptive.

    Before, he had always brought men with him on his visits, lovers with whom his mother had been “civil, even flirtatious,” while his father retreated into his sacred woodshop. Now his mother has died and, at age thirty-six, Raphael has come back to see his dying father, who knows and disapproves of Raphael’s boyfriends but who is unaware that this, his youngest child, may be ill as well. Raphael’s halting, often painful attempt to reconcile with his father forms the centerpiece of Fenton Johnson’s astonishing novel. At times funny, at times heartbreakingly poignant, Scissors, Paper, Rock explores with wisdom and humor the many kinds of family, the infinite varieties of love. Through the intricately interwoven stories of the Hardin parents and children, Scissors, Paper, Rock contrasts the families we inherit — our blood ties — with the families we choose, our partners in love and our friends.

    Seeking warmth and true connection, they shield themselves and loved ones while creating a rarely-glimpsed world of valor, minor grandeur, side-street heroics. Muriel Fraser, a poor Scottish-born spinster, is the subject of a John Singer Sargent portrait in the imagination of her devoted grand-nephew. Tad Worth, a young man dying of AIDS, finds ways to restore vitality to old friends and 18th-century houses. Overnight, one pillar of the community, accused of child molesting, becomes the village pariah. And Clyde Delman, ugliest if kindest man in Falls, finds the love of his eight-year-old son jeopardized when troubling family secrets arise. In each of these splendid complex tales, Allan Gurganus wrings truths–sometimes bruising, ofttimes warming–from human hearts as immense as they are local.

    Austin Smith is pushing fifty, loveless and drifting, until one day he meets Julien, a much younger, married Frenchman. In the beginning, the lovers' only impediments are the comic clashes of culture, age, and temperament. Before long, however, the past begins to catch up with them. In a desperate quest to save health and happiness, they move from Venice to Key West, from Montreal in the snow to Providence in the rain. But it is amid the bleak, baking sands of the Sahara that their love is pushed to its ultimate crisis.

    An author is lucky to bring one character so vividly to life: the gifted McIntyre has done it for all of his.” —New York Times Book Review“I felt as if I were reading a modern-day Middlemarch.” — Kate Christensen, PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author of The Great ManA finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Publishing Triangle’s Ferro-Grumley Award, Lake Overturn is the stirring debut novel of small-town America from critically acclaimed author Vestal McIntyre (You Are Not the One). With intricate plots involving an array of fully realized characters, and dealing with themes such as autism, homosexuality, religion, and addiction, Lake Overturn is sure to appeal to fans of the literary work of Russell Banks (The Sweet Hereafter, Affliction), Rick Moody (The Ice Storm), Augusten Burroughs (Running with Scissors), and Alice Munro (The Moons of Jupiter, The Love of a Good Woman).

    Magically blending ancient headlines and modern myth, Merlis creates a fabulous new world where legendary heroes declare their endowments in personal ads and any panhandler may be a divinity in disguise. Comical, moving, startling in its audacity and range, An Arrow's Flight is a profound meditation on gay identity, straight power, and human liberation.

    From a typical suburban childhood to his perpetual search for true love, Albo evokes a poignant, nostalgic past and a vibrant, energetic present. By turns vulnerable and jaded, flamboyant and obsessive, Hornito is full of subversive humor and outrageous irony.

    Recently, however, his own life has become overwhelmed by wrong choices. When a love affair is mysteriously ended by a Post-it note and followed up by a random street assault, Andy locks himself in his Hell's Kitchen apartment. In solitude, he thinks, he might be able to get a grip on his life. But when he is forced to reemerge six months after the attacks of September 11, the city awaiting him is more bewildering than ever and all the people in his world seem to be part of a vast conspiracy.Equal parts noir, French farce, and homage to New York, Suspension is a surprisingly heartfelt novel about learning to live in a world where nearly everything is decided behind our backs.

    Reprint. 14,000 first printing.