Book picks similar to
Alone by Thomas Moore
fiction
gay-lit
british
lgbt-reading-group-ideas
Castle Faggot
Derek McCormack - 2020
At the heart of the park is Faggotland, a playland for gay men, and Castle Faggot, the darkest dark ride in the world. Home to a cartoon Dracula called Count Choc-o-log, the castle is decorated with the corpses of gays—some were killed, some killed themselves, all ended up as décor.The book includes a map of Faggotland, a photobook of the castle, the instructions for a castle-shaped dollhouse, and the novelization of a TV puppet show about Count Choc-o-log and his friends—reminiscent of the classic stop-motion special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, but even gayer and more grotesque. As scatological as Sade but with a Hanna-Barbera vibe, Castle Faggot transmutes McCormack's love of the lurid and the childlike, of funhouses and sickhouses, into something furiously funny: as Edmund White says, “the mystery of objects, the lyricism of neglected lives, the menace and nostalgia of the past—these are all ingredients in this weird and beautiful parallel universe.”
Left Hand
Paul Curran - 2014
His work has been a huge favorite of lucky insiders like me for years, and now the secret is finally and definitely out." -Dennis Cooper, author of The Marbled Swarm
The Picture of Dorian Gray / Riders of the Purple Sage: CD-Rom Pack
F.H. Cornish
Requiem for a Dream
Hubert Selby Jr. - 1978
She becomes addicted to diet pills in her obsessive quest, while her junkie son, Harry, along with his girlfriend, Marion, and his best friend, Tyrone, have devised an illicit shortcut to wealth and leisure by scoring a pound of uncut heroin. Entranced by the gleaming visions of their futures, these four convince themselves that unexpected setbacks are only temporary. Even as their lives slowly deteriorate around them, they cling to their delusions and become utterly consumed in the spiral of drugs and addiction, refusing to see that they have instead created their own worst nightmares."Selby's place is in the front rank of American novelists. HIs work has the power, the intimacy with suffering and morality, the honesty and moral urgency of Doestoevsky's. To understand Selby's work is to understand the anguish of America." - The New York Times Book Review
Own Death
Péter Nádas - 2002
I realized I could distinguish between my inner self and my physical body... An ice-cold surface covered my inner heat.- In this short story a man relates his inner-most thoughts and reflections as he suffers a heart attack on the on the street and is then brought back to life after three and a half minutes. It is a compelling tale of something appalling and yet completely ordinary, of pain and fear and acceptance, whilst walking the thin dividing line between life and death. In contrast to the speed of this near-death experience, the book includes a series of photographs in which the passage of time is hardly apparent. Over the course of a year the author photographed a wild pear tree in his garden at different times of the day and year, recording its changes under the differing light conditions. My Own Death contrasts perceptions of the here and now with the hereafter, and its complex composition alludes to mortal time and passage.
God Jr.
Dennis Cooper - 2005
God Jr. is a stunningly accomplished new novel that marks a new phase in Cooper's noteworthy career.God Jr. is the story of Jim, a father who survived the car crash that killed his teenage son Tommy. Tommy was distant, transfixed by video games and pop culture, and a mystery to the man who raised him. Now, disabled by the accident, yearning somehow to absolve his own guilt over the crash, Jim becomes obsessed with a mysterious building Tommy drew repetitively in a notebook before he died. As the fixation grows, Jim starts to take on elements of his son - at the expense of his job and marriage - but is he connecting with who Tommy truly was?A tender, wrenching look at guilt, grief, and the tenuous bonds of family, God Jr. is unlike anything Dennis Cooper has yet written. It is a triumphant achievement from one of our finest writers.
I'm From Nowhere
Lindsay Lerman - 2019
She confronts a dying planet and an emerging sense of self, while men arrive with offers to save her from herself. Lerman refuses easy answers and searches the treacherous depths of desire, pain, and entanglement, asking readers if it is possible for a woman to reclaim her life and set its terms without succumbing to suicide or submission.Told in subtly experimental, sparse prose, and set in the American Southwest of today or ten years from now, I'm From Nowhere is a "breathtakingly honest, subversive" examination of the stories we are told-and the stories we tell ourselves-about identity, permanence, and love.
Kill Your Friends
John Niven - 2008
Twenty-seven-year-old A&R man Stelfox is slashing and burning his way through the music industry, a world where 'no one knows anything' and where careers are made and broken by chance and the fickle tastes of the general public - 'Yeah, those animals'.Fuelled by greed and inhuman quantities of cocaine Stelfox blithely criss-crosses the globe ('New York, Cologne, Texas, Miami, Cannes: you shout at waiters and sign credit card slips and all that really changes is the quality of the porn') searching for the next hit record amid a relentless orgy of self-gratification.But as the hits dry up and the industry begins to change, Stelfox must take the notion of cutthroat business practices to murderous new levels in a desperate attempt to salvage his career.Kill Your Friends is a dark, satirical and hysterically funny evisceration of the record business, a place populated by frauds, charlatans and bluffers, where ambition is a higher currency than talent, and where it seems anything can be achieved - as long as you want it badly enough.
A Density of Souls
Christopher Rice - 2000
Meredith, Brandon, and Greg gain popularity, while Stephen is viciously treated as an outcast. Then two violent deaths destroy the already delicate bonds of their friendship.When the friends are drawn back together, new facts about their mutual history are exposed and what was held to be a tragic accident is revealed as murder. As the true story emerges, other secrets begin to unravel with more dangerous, far-reaching consequences.A Density of Souls is a stunning debut novel that uncovers the darker side of the teenage psyche.
Children of the Corn
Stephen King - 1977
Out in the corn, something is watching them, and help is nowhere to be found.From the unrivaled master of horror and the supernatural, Stephen King. “Children of the Corn,” first collected in the extraordinary collection Night Shift in 1973 and then adapted into a horror film franchise of the same name, is a terrifying and unforgettable classic of the genre.
The End of Alice
A.M. Homes - 1996
Here is the incredible story of an imprisoned pedophile who is drawn into an erotically charged correspondence with a nineteen-year-old suburban coed. As the two reveal—and revel in—their obsessive desires, Homes creates in The End of Alice a novel that is part romance, part horror story, at once unnerving and seductive.
Rest and Be Thankful
Emma Glass - 2020
On long, quiet shifts, she and her colleagues, clad in their different shades of blue, care for sick babies, handling their exquisitely frangible bodies, carefully calibrating the mysterious machines that keep them alive. Laura may be burned out. Her hands have been raw from washing as long as she can remember. When she sleeps, she dreams of water; when she wakes, she finds herself lying next to a man who doesn't love her any more. And there is a strange figure dancing in the corner of her vision, always just beyond her reach. Dark yet luminous, sensual yet chilling, ringing with strange music and laced with dread, Rest and Be Thankful is an unforgettable novel that confirms Emma Glass as a visionary new voice.
The Necrophiliac
Gabrielle Wittkop - 1972
Remarkably, the astounding protagonist of Gabrielle Wittkop’s lyrical 1972 novella, The Necrophiliac, has never appeared in English until now. This new translation introduces readers to a masterpiece of French literature, striking not only for its astonishing subject matter but for the poetic beauty of the late author’s subtle, intricate writing. Like the best writings of Edgar Allan Poe or Baudelaire, Wittkop’s prose goes far beyond mere gothic horror to explore the melancholy in the loneliest depths of the human condition, forcing readers to confront their own mortality with an unprecedented intimacy.
The Cement Garden
Ian McEwan - 1978
"Possesses the suspense and chilling impact of Lord of the Flies." Washington Post Book World.
Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Cormac McCarthy - 1985
Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.