Book picks similar to
A Compass Error by Sybille Bedford
fiction
classics
lgbt
tbr
Notes of a Crocodile
Qiu Miaojin - 1994
Told through the eyes of an anonymous lesbian narrator nicknamed Lazi, Qiu Miaojin's cult classic novel is a postmodern pastiche of diaries, vignettes, mash notes, aphorisms, exegesis, and satire by an incisive prose stylist and countercultural icon.Afflicted by her fatalistic attraction to Shui Ling, an older woman who is alternately hot and cold toward her, Lazi turns for support to a circle of friends that includes the devil-may-care, rich-kid-turned-criminal Meng Sheng and his troubled, self-destructive gay lover Chu Kuang, as well as the bored, mischievous overachiever Tun Tun and her alluring slacker artist girlfriend Zhi Rou.Bursting with the optimism of newfound liberation and romantic idealism despite corroding innocence, Notes of a Crocodile is a poignant and intimate masterpiece of social defiance by a singular voice in contemporary Chinese literature.
Myra Breckinridge/Myron
Gore Vidal - 1968
No one -- not aspiring actor Rusty Godowski, not his girlfriend, Mary-Ann Pringle, not powerful agent Letitia Van Allen -- remains untouched by Myra's quest. Her job teaching Empathy and Posture at the Academy of Drama and Modeling, owned by her uncle Buck Loner, gives her the perfect opportunity to vamp, scheme, and seduce her way into the undiscovered lives and passions of others -- while trying to keep a few secrets of her own.In the sequel, Myron, the Breckinridge saga takes an increasingly bizarre turn. Myron seems to be an inconspicuous man with a sweet wife and a Chinese catering business, and Myra, determined to become a megastar, wages an outrageous battle for hormonal supremacy over the body she shares with Myron. In a tale that combines time-travel with the ultimate Hollywood fantasy, Gore Vidal leads us through the movie-star world of the fabulous forties as Myra attempts to alter cinema history.When Myra Breckinridge first appeared in 1968, critics were delighted, baffled, and somewhat appalled by this comedy of sex change. (Readers made it the number-one best-seller.) Time magazine queried: Has literary decency fallen so low? Perhaps they should have asked, Has literature ever been so witty, so provoking, so intriguing? Thirty years later Myra has become literature's most famous transsexual. After all, this is her/his/their age.
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
Fannie Flagg - 1987
Threadgoode telling her life story to Evelyn, who is in the sad slump of middle age. The tale she tells is also of two women-of the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruth, who back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Alabama, a Southern kind of Cafe Wobegon offering good barbecue and good coffee and all kinds of love and laughter, even an occasional murder.
Father of Frankenstein
Christopher Bram - 1995
This is a novel by the author of Hold Tight.
In Youth Is Pleasure
Denton Welch - 1945
An adolescent voyeur, Orvil takes pleasure in the microscopic observation of his relatives and fellow guests, charting their eccentricities and love affairs as faithfully as he exposes his own obsessions. In a highly perceptive Afterword, Jeremy Reed relates the novel to Welch's life and work, praising it for writing that 'oscillates between moments of lyrical serenity and outbreaks of psychological disorder.' Flagrantly controversial on its first publication in 1945, In Youth Is Pleasure will impress new readers with its arresting visual descriptions and its defiance of convention.
Black Narcissus
Rumer Godden - 1939
At night, music floated out over villages and gorges far into the early hours. Now the General's son has bestowed it upon the disciplined Sisters of Mary. Beginning work in the orchards and opening a school and a dispensary for the mountain people, the small band of Sisters are depended for help on the English agent, Mr Dean. But his charm and insolent candour are disconcerting. When he says bluntly 'This is no place for a nunnery', it is as if he already knows their destiny ...
While England Sleeps
David Leavitt - 1993
In While England Sleeps, available for the first time in two years, he moves beyond precisely controlled domestic drama to create a historical novel, set against the rise of fascism in 1930s Europe, that tells a story of love and the violent chaos of war.
The Dud Avocado
Elaine Dundy - 1958
Edith Wharton and Henry James wrote about the American girl abroad, but it was Elaine Dundy’s Sally Jay Gorce who told us what she was really thinking. Charming, sexy, and hilarious, The Dud Avocado gained instant cult status when it was first published and it remains a timeless portrait of a woman hell-bent on living.“I had to tell someone how much I enjoyed The Dud Avocado. It made me laugh, scream, and guffaw (which, incidentally, is a great name for a law firm).” –Groucho Marx[The Dud Avocado] is one of the best novels about growing up fast..." -The Guardian“A cheerfully uninhibited...variation on the theme of the Innocents Abroad...Miss Dundy comes up with fresh and spirited comedy....Her novel is enormous fun—sparklingly written, genuinely youthful in spirit.” —The Atlantic
The Bone People
Keri Hulme - 1984
One night her solitude is disrupted by a visitor—a speechless, mercurial boy named Simon, who tries to steal from her and then repays her with his most precious possession. As Kerewin succumbs to Simon’s feral charm, she also falls under the spell of his Maori foster father Joe, who rescued the boy from a shipwreck and now treats him with an unsettling mixture of tenderness and brutality. Out of this unorthodox trinity Keri Hulme has created what is at once a mystery, a love story, and an ambitious exploration of the zone where indigenous and European New Zealand meet, clash, and sometimes merge.Winner of both a Booker Prize and Pegasus Prize for Literature, The Bone People is a work of unfettered wordplay and mesmerizing emotional complexity.
Doting
Henry Green - 1952
Stuck in a passionless marriage, Arthur becomes infatuated with Annabel, a much younger woman. Their relationship sets into motion a series of intertwining affairs between five close friends less concerned with love than with their attempts to keep the other lovers apart.
Blue Heaven
Joe Keenan - 1988
Living in New York in 1991 is Gilbert Selwyn, a young man possessed of boundless charm and an allergy to employment, who has devised a plan to wring a nice pile of loot from his mother's newest (and obscenely wealthy) husband.The scheme, simply put, is to get married for the gifts. But Gilbert, who's gay, needs a fiancée... Enter Moira Finch, a demonically conniving young woman whose own mother, having recently married the Duke of Dorsetshire, will contribute richly to the couple's receipts. Enter, too, Philip Cavanagh, Gilbert's longtime friend, former lover, and highly strung Best Man. And enter, finally, the Cellinis, Gilbert's huge internecine stepfamily, whose fortune has not been amassed as innocently as Gilbert first thought, and who conform rather more closely to Italian-American stereotypes than Gilbert would like to believe. As Gilbert, Moira, and Philip struggle to keep their plot under wraps, the scams get bigger and more perilous, deceit multiplies, and a wonderfully calamitous trail leads us towards what could be the wedding of the season.
Autobiography of Red
Anne Carson - 1998
As he grows older, Geryon escapes his abusive brother and affectionate but ineffectual mother, finding solace behind the lens of his camera and in the arms of a young man named Herakles, a cavalier drifter who leaves him at the peak of infatuation. When Herakles reappears years later, Geryon confronts again the pain of his desire and embarks on a journey that will unleash his creative imagination to its fullest extent. By turns whimsical and haunting, erudite and accessible, richly layered and deceptively simple, Autobiography of Red is a profoundly moving portrait of an artist coming to terms with the fantastic accident of who he is."A profound love story . . . sensuous and funny, poignant, musical and tender." -- The New York Times Book Review"A deeply odd and immensely engaging book. . . . [Carson] exposes with passionate force the mythic underlying the explosive everyday." -- The Village VoiceA NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEARNational book Critics Circle Award Finalist
The Lessons
Naomi Alderman - 2010
Its owner is the mercurial, charismatic Mark Winters, whose rackety trust-fund upbringing has left him as troubled and unpredictable as he is wildly promiscuous. Mark gathers around him an impressionable group of students: glamorous Emmanuella, who always has a new boyfriend in tow; Franny and Simon, best friends and occasional lovers; musician Jess, whose calm exterior hides passionate depths. And James, already damaged by Oxford and looking for a group to belong to. For a time they live in a charmed world of learning and parties and love affairs. But university is no grounding for adult life, and when, years later, tragedy strikes they are entirely unprepared. Universal in its themes of ambition, desire and betrayal, this spellbinding novel reflects the truth that the lessons life teaches often come too late.
The Danish Girl
David Ebershoff - 2000
Uniting fact and fiction into an original romantic vision, The Danish Girl eloquently portrays the unique intimacy that defines every marriage and the remarkable story of Lili Elbe, a pioneer in transgender history, and the woman torn between loyalty to her marriage and her own ambitions and desires.The Danish Girl is an evocative and deeply moving novel about one of the most passionate and unusual love stories of the 20th century.