'Santaland Diaries' contains six of David Sedaris' most profound Christmas stories, from Dinah, the Christmas Whore to Season's Greetings to our Friends and Family.

    What we know of identity is smashed and in its place, true individuals emerge, each bristling with a unique sexuality, a belief-system all their own. Reminiscent of Jane Bowles, William Burroughs, and Colette, her writing glows with an authenticity that is intoxicating and rare. A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 HonoreeWhiting Award WinnerPEN/Hemingway Award FinalistLambda Literary Award FinalistLonglisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction & The Story

    We boys used to overrun the place, and I can still recall my youthful terror not only at the morbid strangeness of this sinister vegetation, but at the eldritch atmosphere and odor of the dilapidated house, whose unlocked front door was often entered in quest of shudders.

    He likes rugby, Formula 1, dogs, the Marvel universe, the sound felt-tips make on paper, rain and drawing on shoes. He also likes me.”NICK: “Things me and Charlie Spring do together include: Watch films. Sit in the same room on different laptops. Text each other from different rooms. Make out. Make food. Make drinks. Get drunk. Talk. Argue. Laugh. Maybe we're kind of boring. But that’s fine with us.”Everyone knows that Nick and Charlie are the perfect couple – that they’re inseparable. But now Nick is leaving for university, and Charlie will be left behind at Sixth Form. Everyone’s asking if they’re staying together, which is a stupid question – they’re ‘Nick and Charlie’, for God’s sake!But as the time to say goodbye gets inevitably closer, both Nick and Charlie question whether their love is strong enough to survive being apart. Or are they delaying the inevitable? Because everyone knows that first loves rarely last forever…"

    But now the rich and unscrupulous Mr. Stephanopoulos has a proposition. A previously unpublished Christmas book by Charles Dickens has turned up in the hands of an English chemistry professor by the name of Sedgwick Crisparkle. Mr. S. wants that book at any price, and he needs James to get it for him. There’s just one catch. James can’t tell the nutty professor who the buyer is. Actually, two catches. The nutty Professor Crisparkle turns out to be totally gorgeous—and on the prowl. Faster than you can say, “Old Saint Nick,” James is mixing business with pleasure…and in real danger of forgetting that this is just a holiday romance. Just as they’re well on the way to having their peppermint sticks and eating them too, Sedgwick discovers the truth. James has been a very bad boy. And any chance Santa will bring him what he wants most is disappearing quicker than the Jolly Old Elf’s sleigh.

    The book is a fierce satire of the gay ghetto and a touching story of one man's desperate search for love there, and reading it today is a fascinating look at how much, and how little, has changed.

    Here, National Book Award winner Paul Monette depicts three men of various economic and social backgrounds, all with one thing in common: They are widowers, in a way, and all of their lovers died of AIDS in an LA hospital within a week of one another.Steven, Sonny, and Dell meet weekly to discuss how to go on with their lives despite the hanging sword of being HIV positive. One tries to find a semblance of normalcy; one rebels openly against the disease, choosing to treat his body as a temple that he can consecrate and desecrate at will; and one throws himself into fierce political activism. No matter what path each one takes, they are all searching for one thing: a way to live and love again.Afterlife finds Paul Monette at his most autobiographical, portraying men in a situation that he himself experienced, and one that he described to critical acclaim in the award-winning Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir.

    The journey is the thing as Pinsker weaves music, memory, technology, history, mystery, love, loss, and even multiple selves on generation ships and cruise ships, on highways and high seas, in murder houses and treehouses. They feature runaways, fiddle-playing astronauts, and retired time travelers; they are weird, wired, hopeful, haunting, and deeply human. They are often described as beautiful but Pinsker also knows that the heart wants what the heart wants and that is not always right, or easy.

    "We have traded tales, my buddies and I; of affairs, encounters, secrets, fears, self-promotion-of fantasies that we make real in the telling." In this, the first volume in Ethan Mordden's acclaimed trilogy on Manhattan gay life, he introduces a small group of friends-Dennis Savage, Little Kiwi, Carlos, and the narrator, Bud-and chronicles their exploration of the new world of gay life and the new people they are in the process of becoming.In a voice at once ironic, wistful, witty, and profound, Mordden investigates his suspicion that all of gay life is stories and that, somehow or other, all these stories are about love.

    In 1975, coach Harlan Brown is hiding from his past at an obscure New York college, after he was fired from Penn State University on suspicion of being gay. A tough, lonely ex-Marine of 39, Harlan has never allowed himself to love another man. Then Billy Sive, a brilliant young runner, shows up on his doorstep. He and his two comrades, Vince Matti and Jacques LaFont, were just thrown off a major team for admitting they are gay. Harlan knows that, with proper training, Billy could go to the '76 Olympics in Montreal. He agrees to coach the three boys under strict conditions that thwart Billy's growing attraction for his mature but compelling mentor. The lean, graceful frontrunner with gold-rim glasses sees directly into Harlan's heart. Billy's gentle and open acceptance of his sexuality makes Harlan afraid to confront either the pain of his past, or the challenges which lay in wait if their intimacy is exposed. But when Coach Brown finds himself falling in love with his most gifted athlete, he must combat his true feelings for Billy or risk the outrage of the entire sports world - and their only chance at Olympic gold.

    Burned by her traumatic past, Angel is new to the drag world, new to ball culture, and has a yearning inside of her to help create family for those without. When she falls in love with Hector, a beautiful young man who dreams of becoming a professional dancer, the two decide to form the House of Xtravaganza, the first-ever all-Latino house in the Harlem ball circuit. But when Hector dies of AIDS-related complications, Angel must bear the responsibility of tending to their house alone.As the mother of the house, Angel recruits Venus, a whip-fast trans girl who dreams of finding a rich man to take care of her; Juanito, a quiet boy who loves fabrics and design; and Daniel, a butch queen who accidentally saves Venus’s life. The Xtravaganzas must learn to navigate sex work, addiction, and persistent abuse, leaning on each other as bulwarks against a world that resists them. All are ambitious, resilient, and determined to control their own fates, even as they hurtle toward devastating consequences. Told in a voice that brims with wit, rage, tenderness, and fierce yearning, The House of Impossible Beauties is a tragic story of love, family, and the dynamism of the human spirit.

    From the back cover copy:Max Desir loved his Italian-American family--even after his iron-willed father exiled him from its intimate innner circle.Max Desir loved his lover, Nick, with whom he openly took up life first amid the enchantment of Rome, then amid the realities of New York.Two loves so deeply felt--in a man so painfully divided...

    The stories are set in New York and in Italy (where Malamud's alter ego, the struggling New York Jewish painter, Arthur Fidelman, roams amid the ruins of old Europe in search of his artistic patrimony); they tell of egg candlers and shoemakers, matchmakers, and rabbis, in a voice that blends vigorous urban realism, Yiddish idiom, and a dash of artistic magic.The Magic Barrel is a book about New York and about the immigrant experience, and it is high point in the modern American short story. Few books of any kind have managed to depict struggle and frustration and heartbreak with such delight, or such artistry.

    Emily is a member of a family in the antebellum Southern aristocracy; after the Civil War, the family has fallen on hard times.

    These doomed love stories and twisted fairytales explore the lives of women--particularly queer women and mothers--and reveal the monsters lurking in our daily lives: the madness, isolation, betrayals, and regrets that arise as we seek human connection.Through this collection, readers are taken to places where the sun never sets, where cornfields rustle ominously and sleepwalkers prowl the night. In "Weekend," the lead actors of an avant-garde television show begin to confuse their characters' identities with their own; in "Go West, and Grow Up," a young girl living in a car with her mother is forced to shed her innocence too soon; and in "Safekeeping," a woman trapped inside a futuristic safehouse gradually unravels as she waits for her lover, who may never return.With exquisite prose and transfixing imagery, Joffre explores worlds both strange and familiar, homing in on the darker side of humanity. Powerful, unsettling, and wildly imaginative, Night Beast is a mind-bending, genre-hopping debut, a provocative and uncommonly raw examination of relationships and sexuality, trauma and redemption, the meaning of family, and coming-of-age--and growing old--as an outsider.