Through his eyes we encounter the composer Robert Christian Gustafson, an Iowa preacher's son whose good looks constitute both a mythic draw and a major limitation, and Angelina "Alabama" Byrnes, a failed deb, five feet tall but bristling with outsized talent.  These friends shelter each other, promote each other's work, and compete erotically.  When tragedy strikes, this circle grows up fast, somehow finding, at the worst of times, the truest sort of family.Funny and heartbreaking, as eventful as Dickens and as atmospheric as one of Fitzgerald's parties, Plays Well with Others combines a fable's high-noon energy with an elegy's evening grace.  Allan Gurganus's celebrated new novel is a lovesong to imperishable friendship, a hymn to a brilliant and now-vanished world.

    Before long, however, she realizes that her feelings for this charismatic, extremely guarded stranger are far from straightforward. In the meantime, her troubled teenage patient, Annie, runs away from home and soon will reinvent herself in New York as an aspiring and ruthless actress, as unencumbered as humanly possible by any personal attachments. And Mitch, Grace’s ex-husband, who is a therapist as well, leaves the woman he’s desperately in love with to attend to a struggling native community in the bleak Arctic. We follow these four compelling, complex characters from Montreal and New York to Hollywood and Rwanda, each of them with a consciousness that is utterly distinct and urgently convincing. With razor-sharp emotional intelligence, Inside poignantly explores the many dangers as well as the imperative of making ourselves available to—and responsible for—those dearest to us.

    Meet 'Bob the Book, ' a gay book for sale in a Greenwich Village bookstore, where he falls in love with another book, Moishe. But an unlikely customer separates the young lovers. As Bob wends his way through used book bins, paper bags, knapsacks, and lecture halls, hoping to be reunited with Moishe, he meets a variety of characters, both book and human, including Angela, a widowed copy of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, and two other separated lovers, Neil and Jerry, near victims of a book burning. Among their owners are Alfred and Duane, whose on-again, off-again relationship unites and separates our book friends. Will Bob find Moishe? Will Jerry and Neil be reunited? Will Alfred and Duane make it work? Read 'Bob the Book' to find all the answers...

    He lives in the exact center of center-less Los Angeles with his depressed father, Greg, and imaginative younger sister, Sandra. When Greg suddenly dies, more than everything changes and the relatively smooth orbits of family and friends are altered when Adam needs them most. In the middle of the drama, a man in uniform appears—and he is more than interested in Adam. This man, a policeman, is warm, witty and wise. He is 6 foot-something, dirty blond, and . . . well, he’s a California Boy trapped inside the body of a 38 year-old man. But how can Adam consider the possibility of a relationship when he is dealing with his father’s death, his friends’ (and his own) pre-pre-pre mid-life crises, his mother’s ambivalence, and his little sister’s need for him? Then again, how can he not?Half-Life is about being—or at least feeling—young and old at the same time. About loving, or wanting to love, but knowing that life and love are both as exuberant and seductive yet two-dimensional and illusory as a billboard along any of Los Angeles’s endless freeways.Aaron Krach has written for Time Out New York, Out magazine, InStyle, thePosition.com, CBSHealthwatch.com, The Independent Film and Video Monthly, TVTS, Oui, DOX: International Documentary Film, indieWIRE, A&U magazine Instinct, HX, The Villager, Downtown Express, and TWN (Florida). The former editor of Empire Magazine and arts editor of Gay City News, he is now the senior editor of Cargo magazine. He lives in New York City. Half-Life is his first novel.

    After 20 years, the trauma from a childhood assault resurfaces as he grapples with the fate of his ex-husband, a colleague accused of sexually harassing a student. To gain perspective, Ari arranges to reconnect with his high school crush, Justin Jackson, a bold step which forces him to reflect on their relationship in the segregated suburbs of Detroit during the 1990s and the secrets they still share. An honest story about recovery and coping with both past and present, framed by the meteoric rise and fall of the band Nirvana and the wide-reaching scope of the #metoo movement, Nirvana Is Here, explores issues of identity, race, sex, and family with both poignancy and unexpected humor. Deftly told intertwining stories with rich, real characters are reminiscent of the sensuality and haunting nostalgia of André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name blended with the raw emotion of Kurt Cobain’s lyrics.  Written by award-winning writer Aaron Hamburger, Nirvana Is Here is “a wonder of a book,” according to acclaimed novelist Lauren Grodstein (Our Short History). “As a Jewish Gen-Xer, the novel reminded me exactly of who I once was—and all that I still want to be. A brilliant accomplishment.”

    . . both urgent and convincing."--The New York Times Book Review In this sequel to David Feinberg's national bestseller Eighty-Sixed, B.J. Rosenthal navigates life with an HIV-positive diagnosis amidst the "constant tide of deaths" in New York City during the AIDS crisis.

    These punchy, sharply observed stories blur the lines between longing and choosing, exploring the narrator's experience as an involuntary one. Tinged with pathos and humour, they interrogate the moments in which femininity, womanness, and identity are not only questioned but also imposed.Shut Up You're Pretty is the first book to be published under the imprint VS. Books, a series of books curated and edited by writer-musician Vivek Shraya featuring work by new and emerging Indigenous or Black writers, or writers of colour.

    Two o'clock in the morning on a Saturday night in Riverside, Nova Scotia, when he realises he has fallen in love - with exactly the wrong person. There are no volcanic eruptions. No floods or fires. Just Stephen, watching TV with his best friend, realising that life, as he knows it, will never be the same.The smart move would be to run away - from Riverside, his overly dependent mother, his distant, pot-smoking father, and especially his feelings. But then Stephen begins to wonder: what would happen if he had the courage to face the end of the world head on?

    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.

     Camp Levi nestled in the Mississippi countryside is designed to "cure" young teenage boys of their budding homosexuality. Will Dillard, a Midwestern graduate student, spent a summer at the camp as a teenager, and has since tried to erase that experience from his mind. But when a fellow student alerts him that a slasher movie based on the camp is being released, he is forced to confront his troubled history and possible culpability in the death of a fellow camper. As past and present are woven together, Will recounts his "rehabilitation," eventually returning to the abandoned campgrounds to solve the mysteries of that pivotal summer, and to reclaim his story from those who have stolen it. With a masterful confluence of sensibility and place, How to Survive a Summer introduces an exciting new literary voice."

    What this does to their lives, families, team, and the President of the US is hilarious, poignant, brilliant, and dazzling fun.

    Although Terrence O’Connor, the beautiful boy who was his tormentor, is now a successful writer in Manhattan, he is also a man searching out his own identity. As Ben and Terrence form an unlikely friendship, hidden motives and long-kept secrets bubble to the surface. Does Ben realize he’s fallen in love with Terrence? And can Terrence admit to his own confused feelings? Darkly disturbing and brilliantly written, here is a chilling depiction of the once-victim who unwittingly becomes the bully.

    Orphaned as teenagers, they have grown up under the exasperated watch of their Sikh uncle, who runs a bagel shop in Montreal's Hasidic community of Mile End. Together, they try to make sense of the rich, confusing brew of values, rituals, and beliefs that form their inheritance. Yet as they grow towards adulthood, their paths begin to diverge. Beena catches the attention of one of the "bagel boys" and finds herself pregnant at sixteen, while Sadhana drives herself to perfectionism and anorexia.When we first meet the adult Beena, she is grappling with a fresh grief: Sadhana has died suddenly and strangely, her body lying undiscovered for a week before anyone realizes what has happened. Beena is left with a burden of guilt and an unsettled feeling about the circumstances of her sister's death, which she sets about to uncover. Her search stirs memories and opens wounds, threatening to undo the safe, orderly existence she has painstakingly created for herself and her son.Heralded across Canada for the power and promise of her debut collection, Mother Superior, Nawaz proves with Bone and Bread that she is one of our most talented and unique storytellers.

    With genuine caring and concern for her boys, Franny looks after the gay men of Provincetown with the ultimate goal of making a place in the world for those who don't belong and making the world better for all.

    Taking the advice (and financial support) of a wealthy aunt, he decides to "toss the tiara and get a life." Unfortunately, Daniel's only degrees are in "extensive show tune knowledge, advanced lip-synch, and how to cover up a five o'clock shadow." With his best friend beginning to die from AIDS, his ex-boyfriend prowling around, and his ex-boyfriend's new boyfriend making a pass at Daniel, what's a boy to do but throw himself into intensive weeding and planting of his new apartment garden? And if a handsome stranger should smile down at him from a nearby window, so much the better. Timothy James Beck's debut novel is detailed, realistic, and continually interesting. His main character spends so much energy exhaustively "processing" what happens to him, however, that this might as well have been a lesbian novel. With a little editing, It Had to Be You would have been a much stronger book, but patient readers will agree that Beck shows great promise along the lines of Felice Picano and Neal Drinnan. --Regina Marler