The Friendly Young Ladies


Mary Renault - 1943
    Sheltered, naïve, and just eighteen, Elsie leaves the stifling environment of her parents’ home in Cornwall to seek out her sister, Leo, who had run away nine years earlier. She finds Leo sharing a houseboat, and a bed, with the beautiful, fair-haired Helen. While Elsie’s arrival seems innocent enough, it is the first of a series of events that will turn Helen and Leo’s contented life inside out. Soon a randy young doctor is chasing after all three women at once, a neighborly friendship begins to show an erotic tinge, and long-quiet ghosts from Leo’s past begin to surface. Before long, no one is sure just who feels what for whom.Mary Renault wrote this delightfully provocative novel in the early 1940s, creating characters that are lighthearted, charming, and free-spirited partly in answer to the despair characteristic of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness or Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour. The result is a witty and stylish story that offers exceptional insight into the world of upcoming writers and artists of in 1930s London, chronicling their rejection of society’s established sexual mores and their heroic pursuits of art and life.

Legacy of Love


Marianne K. Martin - 1997
    "What do you want from me?" she whispered.Suzanne pressed up into Sage's embrace, her body making demands on the skillful hands, commanding pleasure from the exciting mouth. "I need you to love me...as long as you possibly can".What was it about Sage Bristo that drew women to her? Maybe it was the tall, toned body and androgynous good looks. Perhaps they liked her confidence -- her movements and manner so sure and decisive. Or was it the air of mystery, the temptation of a challenge to unravel?Sage couldn't explain the attraction, but she had certainly benefited from it, at least physically. As her reputation as a Don Juana grew, so did her black book of admiring women. Women who wanted to spoil her, to own her, to please her. Women who would do anything for her. But never the woman she needed the most -- the one woman who could lead her through the realm of desire, to the thing she desires most...

Sing You Home


Jodi Picoult - 2011
    But her husband Max disagrees - more than that, he wants a divorce. When they separate, there is no mention of the unborn children they created together, still waiting at the clinic.The Zoe falls in love again, out of the blue, and finds herself with an unexpected second chance to have a family.But Max has found a new life too - one with no place in it for people like Zoe. And he will stand up in court to say that her new choice of partner makes her an unfit mother.Jodi Picoult's most powerful novel yet asks who has the right to decide what makes the ideal family?

The Rehearsal


Eleanor Catton - 2008
    When news spreads of a high school teacher's relationship with his underage student, participants and observers alike soon take part in an elaborate show of concern and dismay. But beneath the surface of the teenage girls' display, there simmers a new awareness of their own power. They obsessively examine the details of the affair with the curiosity, jealousy, and approbation native to any adolescent girl, under the watchful eye of their stern and enigmatic saxophone teacher, whose focus may not be as strictly on their upcoming recital as she implies.

Jam on the Vine


LaShonda Katrice Barnett - 2015
    Living in the poor, segregated quarter of Little Tunis, Ivoe immerses herself in printed matter as an escape from her dour surroundings. She earns a scholarship to the prestigious Willetson College in Austin, only to return over-qualified to the menial labor offered by her hometown’s racially-biased employers.Ivoe eventually flees the Jim Crow South with her family and settles in Kansas City, where she and her former teacher and lover, Ona, found the first female-run African American newspaper, Jam! On the Vine. In the throes of the Red Summer—the 1919 outbreak of lynchings and race riots across the Midwest—Ivoe risks her freedom, and her life, to call attention to the atrocities of segregation in the American prison system.Skillfully interweaving Ivoe’s story with those of her family members, LaShonda Katrice Barnett’s Jam! On the Vine is both an epic vision of the hardships and injustices that defined an era and a moving and compelling story of a complicated history we only thought we knew.

The Madman and the Nun and The Crazy Locomotive: Three Plays (including The Water Hen}


Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz - 2000
    Startling discontinuities and surprises erupt throughout these avant-garde landscapes by Poland's outstanding modern dramatist where duchesses and policemen, gangsters and surrealist painters, psychiatrists and locomotive engineers wander in and out, kill one another, and carry on philosophical conversations at the same time.

Monty Python's Spamalot: 2005 Tony Award Winner - Best Musical


Eric Idle - 2005
    Vocal selections from the uproarious Broadway production that won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2005. Songs include: All for One * Always Look on the Bright Side of Life * Brave Sir Robin * Come with Me * Find Your Grail * Fisch Schlapping Dance * He Is Not Dead Yet * His Name Is Lancelot * I'm All Alone * King Arthur's Song * Knights of the Round Table * Laker Girls Cheer * Monks Chant * Run Away! * The Song That Goes Like This * Whatever Happened to My Part? * Where Are You? * You Won't Succeed on Broadway. Includes five pages of color photos.

Openly Bob


Bob Smith - 1997
    From bringing your boyfriend home to your father's funeral, to being the only gay couple at a family wedding, to surviving couples counseling, Smith's decidedly wry spin on the events of our lives resonates with keen observation and hilarious truth."So Mom says to me on the phone, 'Just because you're coming home for your father's funeral doesn't mean we can't have fun!'"Sex education, meteor showers, lesbian ventriloquist dummies, fleamarket shopping, body piercing, pot -smoking drag queens, environmental correctness, Judgment Day, Samuel Beckett, Newt Gingrich, Coco Chanel, Sigmund Freud--nothing and no one escapes Smith's incisive eye in this very human collection of comic essays.

Torch Song Trilogy


Harvey Fierstein - 1978
    The four hour-plus play begins with a soliloquy in which he explains his cynical disillusionment with love.Each act focuses on a different phase in Arnold's life. In the first, Arnold meets Ed, who is uncomfortable with his bisexuality. In the second, one year later, Arnold meets Alan, and the two settle down into a blissful existence that includes plans to adopt a child, until tragedy strikes. In the third, several years later, Arnold is a single father raising gay teenager David. Arnold is forced to deal with his mother's intolerance and disrespect when she visits from Florida.

Cha-Ching!


Ali Liebegott - 2013
    Her adventures in getting over take her from SF to NYC, from dyke bars to telemarketing outfits, casinos to free clinics. With the signature poet's voice that has won her awards and acclaim, Liebegott investigates the conjoined hearts of hope and addiction in an unforgettable story of what it means to be young and broke in America.Praise for Cha-Ching!"Cha-Ching! is a rush - the clatter of youth on the angry move, the rattling of dreamy gambles in crappy apartments, the desperate crash of falling for someone despite the million reasons why and the bang! bang! bang! of our tender hearts."—Daniel Handler, author of Why We Broke Up"Cha-Ching! is so raw with need that I found myself itching that addict's itch to chase the seemingly impossible."—Karolina Waclawiak, deputy editor of The Believer and author of How to Get Into the Twin Palms"An open-hearted, deeply romantic story about a fucked-up dyke, her pit bull, her search for love, her tenuous grasp on hope, a pretty girl and the literal spin of the wheel."—Sarah Schulman, author of The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination"In the game of American-life-on-the-go hopscotch, Ali Liebegott's heroine Theo just jumped a square ahead of Dean Moriarty. . . . The author's fine writing about gambling is as good as I ever read, including Dostoevski's and the Barthelme Bros. In the end, love, in whatever twisted, pallid form, a love that has little to do with sexuality, is the only answer. . . .Wonderful book."—Andrei Codrescu, author of So Recently Rent a World: New and Selected Poems

Spurt of Blood


Antonin Artaud - 1925
    Also known as "Jet of Blood".

The Language of Hoofbeats


Catherine Ryan Hyde - 2014
    New to a small town, Jackie and Paula envision a quiet life for their kids: a young adopted son and two teenage foster children, including the troubled Star. However, they quickly butt heads with their neighbor, Clementine, who disapproves of their lifestyle and is incensed when Star befriends her spirited horse, Comet. Haunted by past tragedy and unable to properly care for Comet, Clem nevertheless resents the bond Star soon shares with the horse. When Star disappears with Comet, the neighbors are thrown together—far too close together. But as the search for the pair wears on, both families must learn to put aside their animosity and confront the choices they’ve made and the scars they carry. Plumbing the depths of regret and forgiveness, The Language of Hoofbeats explores the strange alchemy that transforms a group of people into a family.

Broken Like This


Monica Trasandes - 2012
    "Trasandes eloquently renders the passionate and heartrending love story...it’s rare to root for all sides of a love triangle, but the author’s depth of insight into her characters makes this a wonderfully accomplished first novel."—Publisher's WeeklyAn unforgettably haunting novel—intertwining stories reveal how a man and a woman fall in love with the same extraordinary person.Broken Like This by Monica Trasandes is the saga of Kate Harrington—who for the past fifteen years has been the muse, provocateur and lodestone in the lives of Louis Ross and Angela Agnelli. After a car accident in Ibiza, Kate lies comatose and is, unbeknownst to anyone, two months pregnant. Angela and Louis both fly to her side, as does Kate’s step-father, who’s been a dark presence in all of their lives for many years. Told in present day and breathtaking flashbacks, by turns bittersweet and brutally honest—this is a remarkable debut.What begins as an evocative story of love and identity evolves, faster and faster, into a high-scale drama. From sunny, Southern California to the sweaty, musical streets of Brazil; from a garden in Boston to a rooftop in Brooklyn—Broken Like This is a rare novel that captures the utter joy felt when meeting that person whose energy and passion will shape your life forever.

Elephant's Graveyard


George Brant - 2010
    Set in September of 1916, the play combines historical fact and legend, exploring the deep-seated Ameri

The Verge: A Play In Three Acts


Susan Glaspell - 2007
    Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.