The Summer Palace and Other Stories


C.S. Pacat - 2018
    Follow Damen, Laurent and the supporting characters of Captive Prince on a series of adventures set in and around the events of the novels - and beyond, to learn what happens after the final page in the trilogy is turned.

Pennsylvania Station


Patrick E. Horrigan - 2018
    Frederick Bailey is a quiet, cultured, closeted architect reluctantly drawn into the effort to save Pennsylvania Station from being demolished. But when he meets Curt, a vibrant, immature gay activist more than half his age, he is overtaken by passions he hasn't felt in years, putting everything he cares about--his friends, his family, his career and reputation--at risk. As the elegant old train station is dismantled piece by piece to make way for the crass new Madison Square Garden sports arena, Frederick must undergo a reckoning he has dreaded all his life. Award-winning author Patrick E. Horrigan delves into the fractured psyches of mid-twentieth-century gay men, conjuring a picture of New York City and the nation on the brink of explosive cultural change.

Nightswimmer


Joseph Olshan - 1994
    In the decade that followed, Will relocated to the other end of the continent, filling his days with shallow and pointless affairs, unable to come to terms with the bizarre disappearance that could have been a tragic drowning, a well-planned abandonment, or both. While immersing himself in New York’s gay bar and disco scene, and a hedonistic Fire Island culture darkened by the grim specter of AIDS, Will meets Sean Paris, a young man as tortured and damaged by the past as Will himself. Drawn together by mutual doubts, needs, secrets, and obsessions, the intense relationship that they form will make waves in their circles of friends and ex-lovers, transforming Will’s life forever.

As Meat Loves Salt


Maria McCann - 2001
    The nation, seething with religious and political discontent, has erupted into violence and terror. Jacob Cullen and his fellow soldiers dream of rebuilding their lives when the fighting is over. But the shattering events of war will overtake them. A darkly erotic tale of passion and obsession, As Meat Loves Salt is a gripping portrait of England beset by war. It is also a moving portrait of a man on the brink of madness. Hailed as a masterpiece, this is a novel by a most original new voice in fiction.

Edinburgh


Alexander Chee - 2001
    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 Celibate


Michael Arditti - 1997
    An ordinand, he has had a breakdown while serving at the altar. The Church has sent him to a London therapist, rather than a priest, for confession. During the course of his cure, while living in an unfamiliar world of outcasts, fundamentalists, and AIDS sufferers, he is forced to face the reality of his own physical passion: first for a humble rent boy, then for a sadomasochistic pimp, and, finally, for a priest. The healing begins as he gradually comes to terms with his own history.

Blackbird (Little Sister's Classics)


Larry Duplechan - 1986
    Martin’s in 1986, Blackbird is a funny, moving, gay coming-of-age novel about growing up black and gay in Southern California. The lead character, Johnnie Ray Rousseau, is a high school student upset at losing the lead role in the school staging of Romeo and Juliet; if that weren’t enough, his best friend has been beaten badly by his father, and his girlfriend is pressuring him to have sex for the first time. All the while, he’s intrigued by Marshall MacNeill, a fellow drama class member who’s surely the sexiest man to walk God’s green earth—at least according to Johnnie Ray. This novel of adolescent awakening is as fresh and heartfelt as it was when first published. Features an introduction by Michael Nava.

The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories


Truman Capote - 1956
    AS they pass sweet yet hazardous hours in a china tree, The Grass Harp manages to convey all the pleasures and responsibilities of freedom. But most of all it teaches us about the sacredness of love, "that love is a chain of love, as nature is a chain of life."This volume also includes Capote's A Tree of Night and Other Stories, which the Washington Post called "unobstrusively beautiful...a superlative book."

100 Boyfriends


Brontez Purnell - 2021
    His characters solicit sex on their lunch breaks, expose themselves to racist neighbors, sleep with their coworker's husbands, rub Preparation H on their hungover eyes, and, in an uproarious epilogue, take a punk band on a disastrous tour of Europe. They also travel to claim inheritances, push past personal trauma, and cultivate community while living on the margins of a white supremacist, heteronormative society.Armed with a deadpan wit that finds humor in even the lowest of nadirs, Brontez Purnell--a widely acclaimed underground writer, filmmaker, musician, and performance artist--writes with the peerless zeal, insight, and horniness of a gay punk messiah. From dirty warehouses and gentrified bars in Oakland to desolate farm towns in Alabama, Purnell indexes desire, desperation, race, and loneliness with a startling blend of levity and vulnerability. Together, the slice-of-life tales that writhe within 100 Boyfriends are a singular and uncompromising vision of an unexposed queer underbelly. Holding them together is the vision of an iconoclastic storyteller, as fearless as he is human.

Sarahland


Sam Cohen - 2021
    In one story, a Jewish college Sarah passively consents to a form-life in pursuit of an MRS degree and is swept into a culture of normalized sexual violence. Another reveals a version of Sarah finding pleasure—and a new set of problems—by playing dead for a wealthy necrophiliac. A Buffy-loving Sarah uses fan fiction to work through romantic obsession. As the collection progresses, Cohen explodes this search for self, insisting that we have more to resist and repair than our own personal narratives. Readers witness as the ever-evolving "Sarah" gets recast: as a bible-era trans woman, an aging lesbian literally growing roots, a being who transcends the earth as we know it. While Cohen presents a world that will clearly someday end, "Sarah" will continue.In each Sarah's refusal to adhere to a single narrative, she potentially builds a better home for us all, a place to live that demands no fixity of self, no plague of consumerism, no bodily compromise, a place called Sarahland.

I Know You Know Who I Am


Peter Kispert - 2020
    In the title story, the narrator, desperate to save a love affair on the rocks, hires an actor to play a friend he invented in order to seem less lonely, after his boyfriend catches on to his compulsion for lying and demands to know this friend is real; in "Aim for the Heart", a man's lies about a hunting habit leave him with an unexpected deer carcass and the need to parse unsettling high school memories; in "Rorschach", a theater producer runs a show in which death row inmates are crucified in an on-stage rendering of the New Testament, while being haunted daily by an unrequited love and nightly by ghosts of his own creation.In I Know You Know Who I Am, Kispert deftly explores deception and performance, the uneasiness of reconciling a queer identity with the wider world, and creates a sympathetic, often darkly humorous, portrait of characters searching for paths to intimacy, desperate for connection.

How We Are Hungry


Dave Eggers - 2005
    "Another""What It Means When a Crowd in a Faraway Nation Takes a Soldier Representing Your Own Nation, Shoots Him, Drags Him from His Vehicle and Then Mutilates Him in the Dust""The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water""On Wanting to Have Three Walls Up Before She Gets Home""Climbing to the Window, Pretending to Dance""She Waits, Seething, Blooming""Quiet""Your Mother and I""Naveed""Notes for a Story of a Man Who Will Not Die Alone""About the Man Who Began Flying After Meeting Her""Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly""After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned"From the Trade Paperback edition.

The Life to Come and Other Stories


E.M. Forster - 1972
     Featuring fourteen short stories, The Life to Come spans six decades of E. M. Forster's literary career, tracking every phase of his development. Never having sought publication for most of the stories--only two were published in his lifetime--Forster worried his career would suffer because of their overtly homosexual themes. Instead they were shown to an appreciative circle of friends and fellow writers, including Christopher Isherwood, Siegfried Sassoon, Lytton Strachey, and T. E. Lawrence. With stories that are lively and amusing ("What Does It Matter?"; "The Obelisk"), and others that are more somber and thought-provoking ("Dr Woolacott"; "Arthur Snatchfold"), The Life to Come sheds a light on Forster's powerful but suppressed explorations beyond the strictures of conventional society.- Ansell- Albergo Empedocle- The Purple Envelope- The Helping Hand- The Rock- The Life to Come- Dr. Woolacott- Arthur Snatchfold- The Obelisk- What Does It Matter? A Morality- The Classical Annex- The Torque- The Other Boat- Three Courses and a Dessert: Being a New and Gastronomic Version of the Game of Consequences

Mundo Cruel: Stories


Luis Negrón - 2010
    The writing straddles the shifting line between pure, unadorned storytelling and satire, exploring the sometimes hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking nature of survival in a decidedly cruel world.

At Swim, Two Boys


Jamie O'Neill - 2001
    Powerful and artful, and ten years in the writing, it is a masterwork from Jamie O’Neill.Jim Mack is a naïve young scholar and the son of a foolish, aspiring shopkeeper. Doyler Doyle is the rough-diamond son—revolutionary and blasphemous—of Mr. Mack’s old army pal. Out at the Forty Foot, that great jut of rock where gentlemen bathe in the nude, the two boys make a pact: Doyler will teach Jim to swim, and in a year, on Easter of 1916, they will swim to the distant beacon of Muglins Rock and claim that island for themselves. All the while Mr. Mack, who has grand plans for a corner shop empire, remains unaware of the depth of the boys’ burgeoning friendship and of the changing landscape of a nation.