But within six short years, AIDS would claim his lover, his friends, and his future. With nothing left in New York but memories of death, Brian decides to write his mother a letter asking to come back to the place, and family, he was once so desperate to escape.Set in 1986, a year after Rock Hudson’s death shifted the public consciousness of the epidemic and brought the news of AIDS into living rooms and kitchens across America, it is a novel that speaks to the question of what home and family means when we try to forge a life for ourselves in a world that can be harsh and unpredictable. It is written at the far reaches of love and understanding, and zeroes in on the moments where those two forces reach for each other, and sometimes touch.

    Austin Smith is pushing fifty, loveless and drifting, until one day he meets Julien, a much younger, married Frenchman. In the beginning, the lovers' only impediments are the comic clashes of culture, age, and temperament. Before long, however, the past begins to catch up with them. In a desperate quest to save health and happiness, they move from Venice to Key West, from Montreal in the snow to Providence in the rain. But it is amid the bleak, baking sands of the Sahara that their love is pushed to its ultimate crisis.

    The seventeen-year-old, new to everything around her—college, the East Coast, bodies of literature, and the sexual flurries of student life—is shocked by her desire to follow this wherever it will take her. When Flannery finds herself enrolled in a class with the remote, brilliant older woman, she is intimidated at first, but gradually becomes Anne Arden's student—Baudelaire, lipstick colors, or how to travel with a lover—Flannery proves an eager pupil, until one day learns more about Anne than she ever wanted to know.

    His coworker Fletcher Bradford is looking for a heaven spot of his own, and his is even more elusive. Out since age 12, Fletcher's been around more blocks than Mateo has ever painted. He's dated all the jerks, all the creeps, all the losers in between. At 26 he's decided the only way to meet a nice guy is just never to give him a chance to prove otherwise. When he's introduced to Mateo, Fletcher expects to add another notch to his bedpost. But Mateo is different--and from him Fletcher will rediscover a long-lost feeling: surprise. What Fletcher finds in the trunk of Mateo's car will change his life in ways he never imagined--and may help him find what he's always wanted.From the author of THE CRANBERRY HUSH comes an epic story spanning years and hemispheres and miles of painted walls. At times sexy and sweet, gritty and gut-wrenching, THE PAINTING OF PORCUPINE CITY takes readers along with Mateo and Fletcher on an adventure through the subways of Boston to the towers of São Paulo. Are you in?

    But what if the marriage at risk is a gay one, and having a baby involves a surrogate mother?    Pat Faunce is a faltering romantic, a former poetry major who now writes textbooks. A decade into his relationship with Stu, an airline pilot from a fraught Jewish family, he fears he’s losing Stu to other men—and losing himself in their “no rules” arrangement. Yearning for a baby and a deeper commitment, he pressures Stu to move from Manhattan to Cape Cod, to the cottage where Pat spent boyhood summers.    As they struggle to adjust to their new life, they enlist a surrogate: Debora, a charismatic Brazilian immigrant, married to Danny, an American carpenter. Gradually, Pat and Debora bond, drawn together by the logistics of getting pregnant and away from their spouses. Pat gets caught between loyalties—to Stu and his family, to Debora, to his own potent desires—and wonders: is he fit to be a father?    In one of the first novels to explore the experience of gay men seeking a child through surrogacy, Michael Lowenthal writes passionately about marriages and mistakes, loyalty and betrayal, and about how our drive to create families can complicate the ones we already have. The Paternity Test is a provocative look at the new “family values.”

    Seventeen-year-old Edward Zanni, a feckless Ferris Bueller–type, is Peter Panning his way through a carefree summer of magic and mischief. The fun comes to a halt, however, when Edward’s father remarries and refuses to pay for Edward to study acting at Juilliard.Edward’s truly in a bind. He’s ineligible for scholarships because his father earns too much. He’s unable to contact his mother because she’s somewhere in Peru trying to commune with Incan spirits. And, as a sure sign he’s destined for a life in the arts, Edward’s incapable of holding down a job. So he turns to his loyal (but immoral) misfit friends to help him steal the tuition money from his father, all the while practicing for his high school performance of Grease. Disguising themselves as nuns and priests, they merrily scheme their way through embezzlement, money laundering, identity theft, forgery, and blackmail. But, along the way, Edward also learns the value of friendship, hard work, and how you’re not really a man until you can beat up your father—metaphorically, that is.How I Paid for College is a farcical coming-of-age story that combines the first-person tone of David Sedaris with the byzantine plot twists of Armistead Maupin. It is a novel for anyone who has ever had a dream or a scheme, and it marks the introduction to an original and audacious talent.

     Changing Trains is a fictionalised memoire that will transport you back to the glorious 1980s - that time just before mobile devices, the internet and social media changed the world - and one working class boy's journey of discovery and sexual self awareness.

    . .Twenty-three-year-old artist Andrea Morales escaped her Midwestern Catholic childhood—and the closet—to create a home and life for herself within the thriving but insular lesbian underground of Portland, Oregon. But one drunken night, reeling from a bad breakup and a friend’s betrayal, she recklessly crosses enemy lines and hooks up with a man. To her utter shock, Andrea soon discovers she’s pregnant—and despite the concerns of her astonished circle of gay friends, she decides to have the baby.A decade later, when her precocious daughter Lucia starts asking questions about the father she’s never known, Andrea is forced to reconcile the past she hoped to leave behind with the life she’s worked so hard to build.A thoroughly modern and original anti-romantic comedy, Stray City is an unabashedly entertaining literary debut about the families we’re born into and the families we choose, about finding yourself by breaking the rules, and making bad decisions for all the right reasons.

    The story begins with the death of the community's esteemed rabbi, which sets in motion plans for a memorial service and the search for a replacement. The rabbi's nephew and likely successor, Dovid, calls his cousin Ronit in New York to tell her that her father has died. Ronit, who left the community long ago to build a life for herself as a career woman, returns home when she hears the news, and her reappearance exposes tears in the fabric of the community.Steeped in Jewish philosophy and teachings, Disobedience is a perceptive and thoughtful exploration of the laws and practices that have governed Judaism for centuries, and continue to hold sway today. Throughout the novel, Alderman retells stories from the Torah -- Judaism's fundamental source -- and the interplay between these tales and the struggles of the novel's unique characters wields enormous power and wisdom, and will surely move readers to tears.

    Instead, Astrid spends hours lying on the backyard picnic table watching airplanes fly overhead. She doesn't know the passengers inside, but they're the only people who won't judge her when she asks them her most personal questions--like what it means that she's falling in love with a girl.As her secret relationship becomes more intense and her friends demand answers, Astrid has nowhere left to turn. She can't share the truth with anyone except the people at thirty thousand feet, and they don't even know she's there. But little does Astrid know just how much even the tiniest connection will affect these strangers' lives--and her own--for the better.In this truly original portrayal of a girl struggling to break free of society's definitions, Printz Honor author A.S. King asks readers to question everything--and offers hope to those who will never stop seeking real love.

    Unfortunately she finds herself about to be sacrificed. Someone must have told her evil master about her plans to kill him and take over. After that, things just seem to go downhill. She has no choice but to escape the kingdom of Zual, something that to her knowledge has never been done before. She will need to deal with many issues she never had to face before. Among those issues, the white mages, and her conscience. Note: This is a standalone book, not the beginning of a series.

    To do so, he and Anaya fly to House Yaot, the dragon warren that was home to her mother, but the effort fails so spectacularly that he worries he's ruined the company's chance at success. His concerns are compounded when they learn that a mysterious enemy actively works against them, and increasing tension amongst the dragonlinked trainees only adds to his problems.As their enemy continues to interfere with every move they make, the masters disclose their true plan, a much more ambitious undertaking. Then, an unknown dragonlinked is discovered, and a shocking revelation makes it even more important that the new plan succeeds.In order for that to happen, however, the group is going to have to somehow mend their differences, come together, and prove they're capable of their expanded purpose. Because their future, the future of dragons and dragonlinked, rests squarely on their shoulders.In THE BOND, sequel to DRAGONLINKED, author Adolfo Garza Jr. takes readers back to the world of Lethera, where magic and a nascent Industrial Revolution are the the backdrop for tales about dragons and the brave souls who are their bond-mates, the dragonlinked.

    Since she never did find the story she was looking for all those years ago, she decided to write it.In Book I of the trilogy, Tamras arrives in Merin's house to begin her apprenticeship as a warrior, but her small stature causes many, including Tamras herself, to doubt that she will ever become a competent swordswoman. To make matters worse, the Lady Merin assigns her the position of companion, little more than a personal servant, to a woman who came to Merin's house, seemingly out of nowhere, the previous winter, and this stranger wants nothing to do with Tamras.

    Spare yet evocative, this explicit collection depicts the pleasures of new and rediscovered love, lust, and obsession. In the flashes that blur the line between fantasy and reality, each story captures the spontaneous erotic experiences of a small group of middle-class acquaintances, showcasing sexual interludes of kaleidoscopic range—heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, exhibitionistic, and sadomasochistic. Each of these stories, alternating between a woman’s point of view and a man’s, a participant’s and a voyeur’s, expresses a passion for youth, excitement for the new, and nostalgia for love lost. Sensual and provocative, Quiver introduces a fresh voice to the genre of erotica. For fans of Anne Rice's (A.N. Roquelaure) Sleeping Beauty trilogy or Sylvia Day's Bared to You, Learner's writing will electrify readers with its every impulse.

    Which makes it hard for him to be in love with his straight best friend. For his part, Matt is completely oblivious to the way Tretch feels – and Tretch can’t tell whether that makes it better or worse. The problem with living a lie is that the lie can slowly become your life. For Tretch, the problem isn’t just with Matt. His family has no idea who he really is and what he’s really thinking. The girl at the local bookstore has no clue how off-base her crush on him is. And the guy at school who’s a thorn in Tretch’s side doesn’t realize how close to the truth he’s hitting. Tretch has spent a lot of time dancing alone in his room, but now he’s got to step outside his comfort zone and into the wider world. Because like love, a true self can rarely be contained. ANYTHING COULD HAPPEN is a poignant, hard-hitting exploration of love and friendship, a provocative debut that shows that sometimes we have to let things fall apart before we can make them whole again.