The Watergate hearings are in full swing. The Vietnam War is still raging. And homosexuality is still officially considered a mental illness. In the midst of these trying times is sixteen-year-old Jonathan Collins, a bullied, anxious, asthmatic kid, who aside from an alcoholic father and his sympathetic neighbor and friend Starla, is completely alone. To cope, Jonathan escapes to the safe haven of his imagination, where his hero David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and dead relatives, including his mother, guide him through the rough terrain of his life. In his alternate reality, Jonathan can be anything: a superhero, an astronaut, Ziggy Stardust, himself, or completely “normal” and not a boy who likes other boys. When he completes his treatments, he will be normal—at least he hopes. But before that can happen, Web stumbles into his life. Web is everything Jonathan wishes he could be: fearless, fearsome and, most importantly, not ashamed of being gay.Jonathan doesn’t want to like brooding Web, who has secrets all his own. Jonathan wants nothing more than to be “fixed” once and for all. But he’s drawn to Web anyway. Web is the first person in the real world to see Jonathan completely and think he’s perfect. Web is a kind of escape Jonathan has never known. For the first time in his life, he may finally feel free enough to love and accept himself as he is.A poignant coming-of-age tale, Ziggy, Stardust and Me heralds the arrival of a stunning and important new voice in YA.

    Even though their love is forbidden, for Edward there is no other in his life but Richard, and for Richard a life without Edward is unbearable. Has fate determined that they must lead their lives apart?As members of the British force engaged in a doomed bid to save heroic Gordon of Khartoum, besieged by the frenzied armies of the Mahdi, Edward and Richard, cruelly separated by events, and ignorant of the other’s presence, are thrown into their own desperate adventures as the conflict rages on around them… One an officer, the other a lowly cavalry trumpeter, both find Muslim allies willing to risk all to see them through… Two lovers far from each other in a hostile world of enervating heat, unforgiving sand, rocky wastes, but also burning passions—will the young men overcome the ordeal of a life apart to achieve their dream of a destiny together? 131,850 words.extended description-chapter nine at: http://pastehtml.com/view/crdmw4gnm.rtxt

    An honors student at her old school, she is put into remedial classes, spit on and tormented daily.Linda Hairston is the daughter of one of the town's most vocal opponents of school integration. She has been taught all her life that the races should be kept separate but equal.Forced to work together on a school project, Sarah and Linda must confront harsh truths about race, power and how they really feel about one another.Boldly realistic and emotionally compelling, Lies We Tell Ourselves is a brave and stunning novel about finding truth amid the lies, and finding your voice even when others are determined to silence it.

    Isolfr is deeply drawn to the wolves, and though as his father's heir he can refuse the call, he chooses to go. The people of this wintry land depend on the wolfcarls to protect them from the threat of trolls and wyverns, though the supernatural creatures have not come in force for many years. Men are growing too confident. The wolfhealls are small, and the lords give them less respect than in former years.  But the winter of Isolfr's bonding, the trolls come down from the north in far greater numbers than before, and the holding's complaisance gives way to terror in the dark. Isolfr, now bonded to a queen wolf, Viradechtis, must learn where his honor lies, and discover the lengths to which he will to go when it, and love for his wolf, drive him.

    Thatcher's policies have put husbands and sons out of work, and the city's notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the wings. Shuggie's mother Agnes walks a wayward path: she is Shuggie's guiding light but a burden for him and his siblings. She dreams of a house with its own front door while she flicks through the pages of the Freemans catalogue, ordering a little happiness on credit, anything to brighten up her grey life. Married to a philandering taxi-driver husband, Agnes keeps her pride by looking good--her beehive, make-up, and pearly-white false teeth offer a glamourous image of a Glaswegian Elizabeth Taylor. But under the surface, Agnes finds increasing solace in drink, and she drains away the lion's share of each week's benefits--all the family has to live on--on cans of extra-strong lager hidden in handbags and poured into tea mugs. Agnes's older children find their own ways to get a safe distance from their mother, abandoning Shuggie to care for her as she swings between alcoholic binges and sobriety. Shuggie is meanwhile struggling to somehow become the normal boy he desperately longs to be, but everyone has realized that he is "no right," a boy with a secret that all but him can see. Agnes is supportive of her son, but her addiction has the power to eclipse everyone close to her--even her beloved Shuggie.A heartbreaking story of addiction, sexuality, and love, Shuggie Bain is an epic portrayal of a working-class family that is rarely seen in fiction. Recalling the work of Edouard Louis, Alan Hollinghurst, Frank McCourt, and Hanya Yanagihara, it is a blistering debut by a brilliant novelist who has a powerful and important story to tell.

    He has been sent from Bucharest, the city of his childhood, by his wealthy father to embark upon a bohemian adventure and relish the unique pleasures of Parisian life. An innocent in a new city, still grieving the sudden loss of his beloved mother Elena seven years earlier, Dinu is encouraged to enjoy la vie de Bohème by his distant cousin, Eduard. But tentatively, secretly, Dinu is drawn to the Bains du Ballon d’Alsace, a notorious establishment rumoured to offer the men of Paris, married or otherwise, who enjoy something different, everything they crave. It is here that he meets Razvan, a fellow Romanian, the adopted child of a man of refinement – a prince’s boy – whose stories of Proust and other artists entrance Dinu, and who will become the young man’s teacher in the ways of the world. At a distance of forty years, and written in London, his refuge from the horrors of Europe’s early twentieth-century history, Dinu’s memoir of his brief spell in Paris is one of exploration and rediscovery. The love that blossomed that sunlit day in such inauspicious and unromantic surroundings would transcend lust, separation, despair and even death to endure a lifetime.

    In the 1950s, ex-boxer Norman Alonso is a determined and humble Jamaican who has immigrated to Britain with his wife and children to secure a brighter future. Blighted with unexpected illness and racism, Norman and his family are resilient, but are all too aware that their family will need more than just hope to survive in their new country. At the turn of the millennium, Jesse seeks a fresh start in London, escaping a broken immediate family, a repressive religious community and his depressed hometown in the industrial Black Country. But once he arrives he finds himself at a loss for a new center of gravity, and turns to sex work, music and art to create his own notions of love, masculinity and spirituality. A wholly original novel as tender as it is visceral, Rainbow Milk is a bold reckoning with race, class, sexuality, freedom and religion across generations, time and cultures.

    Estranged from his parents and his older brother, he moves in with forty-one-year-old William and begins a disastrous series of attempts to make a new home. Must he make a choice between his family and desire? First published to wide acclaim in 1999, Lawnboy by Paul Lisicky wanders the lush and tumultuous landscape of the early 1990s, its south Florida setting as fertile and troubling as Evan's inner life.

    Fourteen-year-old Amrith is caught up in the life of the cheerful, well-to-do household in which he is being raised by his vibrant Auntie Bundle and kindly Uncle Lucky. He tries not to think of his life “before,” when his doting mother was still alive. Amrith’s holiday plans seem unpromising: he wants to appear in his school’s production of Othello and he is learning to type at Uncle Lucky’s tropical fish business. Then, like an unexpected monsoon, his cousin arrives from Canada and Amrith’s ordered life is storm-tossed. He finds himself falling in love with the Canadian boy. Othello, with its powerful theme of disastrous jealousy, is the backdrop to the drama in which Amrith finds himself immersed.Shyam Selvadurai’s brilliant novels, Funny Boy and Cinnamon Gardens, have garnered him international acclaim. In this, his first young adult novel, he explores first love with clarity, humor and compassion.

    It is the story of Pierre and Gerard, two teenagers who share a love that no one else around them can condone. The two young men discover their destiny in each other's arms, their passion coupled with violence-and ultimately pay the price. The novel is a profoundly lyrical ode to adolescent love and sexuality, as well as a bold and elegant rejection of society's values while on the road to self-destruction.Told in two parts, the poetic love story of Wicked Angels is first told by Pierre, then by Gerard. This erotic classic follows their passionate relationship as it builds in intensity, with affection between them punctuated with rough sex and tender romance. Pierre is handsome, introverted, jealous, and sadistic. Gerard is charming, roguish, intelligent, and vain. Together they form an imperfect union of all-encompassing love that is destined to fail.Translator Thomas Armbrecht, PhD, helpfully includes an informative introduction that puts the novel into the proper context of the times and reviews the book's problems with censorship.Excerpts from Wicked Angels:Gerard took a slingshot out of his pocket, calmly picked up a pebble from the walk, aimed, and destroyed the first glass bell. The air filled with the sound of shattering crystal. I didn't protest; I was overcome. One after the other, each glass cover was broken. More than one, struck exactly in the middle, exploded like alandmine. I asked Gerard to leave the last one for me. He handed me his slingshot. I watched my stone hit the glass and reduce it to shards. Gerard grabbed me around the waist, trembling, his mouth humid with saliva, his fingers filled with earth.Before us, the neat furrows were gone; it looked like a bomb had been dropped. Gerard wanted some sort of an apotheosis. He unscrewed a watering pipe, splashed about, and then opened the valves of the cistern. Rainwater spewed out in torrents, drowning the seedlings, carrying the glass debris across the garden. A miniature tulip planted between the red currant bushes and the tool shed started to drown. Gerard's shirt, covered with spray and wet to the shoulder, stuck to his flesh. Its transparency revealed his skin. Getting up, he burst out laughing: "And that's not all, citizen!" he said to me, "On to the Bastille!" The Bastille was what we called the Decazes' pigeon house. We had to cross two vegetable gardens to get to their yard and to the slate-covered tower where they raised hunting birds.And:My heart beating, I dashed out into the hall. My cousin's voice surged forward from the depths of me, climbing into my chest and putting all of his words of love into my mouth. Their violence intoxicated me. I knocked on his door. Everything was still, and yet I could tell he was close, on the other side of the door, his head pressed against the wood. I could have drawn the outline of his body, so strongly did I sense it pressed against the door that I vainly wanted him to open. He revealed himself with every exhalation. His breath was so close that his lips had to be on the door. I kissed the wall passionately, and threw myself against it. We were like two lovers separated by a prison wall, more visible to each other now than in the suffocation of their kisses, showing more love here than through their gestures of love.Wicked Angels lives on as a passionate and ultimately tragic story of extreme and ill-fated love that transcends conceptions of gender, youth, and class in society.

    Fee and his friends are forced to bear grief, shame, and pain that endure long after the director is imprisoned. Fee survives even as his friends do not, but a deep-seated horror and dread accompany him through his self-destructive college days and after, until the day he meets a beautiful young student named Warden and is forced to confront the demons of his brutal past.

    The first is told episodically by John, a hustler in New York, who falls in love with Martin, a man dying of AIDS. Interwoven with these stories is a second set, in which characters named Martin and John appear, but living different lives. The resulting novel is a work of stunning originality that is "inspired and brilliant" (The Nation).

    Besieged by the press, his widow Millie flees to a remote Scottish village, where she seeks solace in memories of their marriage. The reminiscences of those who knew Joss Moody render a moving portrait of a shared life founded on an intricate lie, one that preserved a rare, unconditional love.

    Neverland is his real home. So when Peter returns to it after ten years in the real world, he’s surprised to find a Neverland that no longer seems to need him.The only person who truly missed Peter is Captain James Hook, who is delighted to have his old rival back. But when a new war ignites between the Lost Boys and Hook’s pirates, the ensuing bloodshed becomes all too real – and Peter’s rivalry with Hook starts to blur into something far more complicated, sensual, and deadly.

    Seventeen of the best young adult authors across the queer spectrum have come together to create a collection of beautifully written diverse historical fiction for teens. From a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood set in war-torn 1870s Mexico featuring a transgender soldier, to two girls falling in love while mourning the death of Kurt Cobain, forbidden love in a sixteenth-century Spanish convent or an asexual girl discovering her identity amid the 1970s roller-disco scene, All Out tells a diverse range of stories across cultures, time periods and identities, shedding light on an area of history often ignored or forgotten.StoriesRoja - Anna-Marie McLemoreThe Sweet Trade - Natalie C. ParkerAnd They Don`t Kiss at the End - Nilah MagruderBurnt Umber - Mackenzi LeeThe Dresser & the Chambermaid - Robin TalleyNew Year - Malinda LoMolly`s Lips - Dahlia AdlerThe Coven - Kate ScelsaEvery Shade of Red - Elliot WakeWillows - Scott TraceyThe Girl with the Blue Lantern - Tess SharpeThe Secret Life of a Teenage Boy - Alex SanchezWalking After Midnight - Kody KeplingerThe End of the World as We Know It - Sara FarizanThree Witches - Tessa GrattonThe Inferno & the Butterfly - Shaun David HutchinsonHealing Rosa - Tehlor Kay Mejia