In each chapter, titled after a letter of the alphabet, an anonymous narrator details his experiences, travelling to cruising grounds and sex clubs, exploring the boundaries of sex, desire, pleasure, and the body, while reflecting on the limits of language and the act of writing.In the tradition of Georges Bataille, Kathy Acker and Jean Genet, these pieces take us to places language doesn't often go. Kemp powerfully stages a series of anonymous encounters, describing the relentless pursuit of sexual pleasure with luminous intensity, while at the same time facing the impossibility of capturing the moments he describes. This is a bold and challenging work, unashamedly sensual and searching. Kemp beautifully counterpoises explicit description with a searing interrogation of the extreme measures taken in the quest for sexual fulfillment.

    His relationship with Rachel is over and he’s moving out of the home they’ve shared for six years. They get along, but he can’t fix a relationship when the person he’s with is the wrong gender. Jamie Robertson, one of the removal men, is huge and ridiculously gorgeous, and Mark is smitten at first sight. When a cardboard box splits, revealing items of a personal nature that Mark never wanted anybody to see, he’s mortified. But it sparks the start of a beautiful friendship with benefits. As Jamie initiates Mark into the joys of gay sex, the two men get increasingly close and “nothing serious” turns into something rather important to both of them. But communication isn’t their strong point. Will either man ever find the courage to be honest about his feelings? Please note that although this edition has been re-edited for publication, there is no new or additional content.

    Five months later, the sleepy community is still in shock and mourning. Ricky’s sister, Alyssa, returns to confront her shattered, withdrawn mother and her guilt over the brother she left adrift. Mark McVitry, the lone survivor of the deadly outburst sparked by his own cruelty, is tormented by visions of Ricky’s vengeful spirit. Ricky’s surrogate older brother, Corky Meeks, grapples with doubts about the fragile boy he tried to protect but may have doomed instead. And Jeremy Little, who inadvertently became Ricky’s long-distance Internet crush despite never having met, seeks to atone for failing to hear his friend’s cries for help.For those closest to the tormented killer, shock and grief have given way to soul searching, as they’re forced to confront their broken dreams, buried desires, and missed opportunities. And in their shared search for meaning and redemption, Ricky’s loved ones find a common purpose: learning to trust their feelings, fighting for real intimacy in a world grown selfish and insincere, and fearlessly embracing all that matters most…before it’s gone from their lives.

    On impulse, he buys the man a cup—but an attempt to strike up conversation ends in the young man walking off, seemingly put off by Tom Walford—the tabloids’ favourite billionaire—buying him coffee. But when he reappears in Tom's lecture, all Tom knows is that he doesn't want the man slipping away a second time. Agreeing to dinner with a man he only knows from internet gossip columns isn't the wisest decision Cin's ever made, but he wants to like the infamous Tom Walford and he can't do that if he doesn't give the man a fair chance to be likeable. Which he is, almost frustratingly so, to the point Cin wishes maybe he hadn't been so fair because he never had any intention of getting attached to Tom, who seems to come from a world far too different from his own for anything between them to last. Little does Cin know, they’ve got a lot more in common than he imagines—including their shared discomfort with their assigned genders, and all the complications that go with it.

    Because of pranks, indiscretions, and plain bad timing, his ability to work in New York's temples of haute cuisine is a thing of the past. When Toby's sister tells him he should look up an acquaintance whose restaurant -- Le Potiron --is failing, he doesn't have much choice.Pretty soon he's in bed, literally, with a cook who hates people, trying to save a restaurant that only the neighborhood mothers seem to love, and on the verge of another --possibly painful -- lesson or two about what it means to be successful.Evan hates everyone but Toby. Toby likes to stir things up. See what's on the menu at Le Potiron, in Stirring Up Trouble.

    He’s been with his partner, Lloyd, for seven years now, but when Lloyd announces that there’s no passion left between them, Jeff is sent into something of an existential frenzy. Desperate not to end up alone, Jeff haunts the dance floor and roadside rest stops, finding both the sordid and the sublime in anonymous encounters. But it’s love he’s after, so ultimately it’s his bittersweet romance in Provincetown with Eduardo, twenty-two and a vision of gorgeous, wide-eyed youth, that lingers in his mind and seems to hold the answers he seeks. This is a story of a man coming to terms with the accelerating ambiguity of his world, where men die young but old age is actively devalued. It is the story of gay life today, the life being led by thousands of men trying desperately to keep up, and to discover if anything really unites gay men other than desire. It is the story of how the truths of gay life are handed down from gay generation to gay generation. It is the story of what separates the men from the boys.

    Soehnlein captures the spirit of a generation and an era, embodied in the haunting, unstoppable voice of thirteen-year-old Robin MacKenzie, a modern-day Holden Caulfield, whose struggle for a place in the world is as ferocious as it is real.The time is the late 1970s--an age of gas shortages, head shops, and Saturday Night Fever. The place, suburban New Jersey. At a time when the teenagers around him are coming of age, Robin MacKenzie is coming undone. While "normal boys" are into cars, sports, and bullying their classmates, Robin enjoys day trips to New York City with his elegant mother, spinning fantastic tales for her amusement in an intimate ritual he has come to love. He dutifully plays the role of the good son for his meat-and-potatoes father, even as his own mind is a jumble of sexual confusion and painful self-doubt. But everything changes in one, horrifying instant when a tragic accident wakes his family from their middle-American dream and plunges them into a spiral of slow destruction.As his family falls apart day by day, Robin finds himself pulling away from the unquestioned, unexamined life that has been carefully laid out for him. Small acts of rebellion lead to larger questions of what it means to stand on his own. Falling into a fevered triangle with two other outcasts, Todd Spicer and Scott Schatz, Robin embarks on an explosive odyssey of sexual self-discovery that will take him beyond the spring-green lawns of suburbia, beyond the fraying fabric barely holding together his quickly unraveling family, and into a complex future, beyond the world of normal boys.In The World Of Normal Boys, K.M. Soehnlein has created a dazzling gem of a debut novel in the tradition of Ordinary People and A Boy's Own Story, one that sparkles with raw honesty, poetic beauty, wry insight, and a rare richness of emotion that reverberates long after the last page is read. It is a story about growing up and falling apart, of rebellion and acceptance, of unspoken lives and irreversible choices that are made.

    Recently, however, his own life has become overwhelmed by wrong choices. When a love affair is mysteriously ended by a Post-it note and followed up by a random street assault, Andy locks himself in his Hell's Kitchen apartment. In solitude, he thinks, he might be able to get a grip on his life. But when he is forced to reemerge six months after the attacks of September 11, the city awaiting him is more bewildering than ever and all the people in his world seem to be part of a vast conspiracy.Equal parts noir, French farce, and homage to New York, Suspension is a surprisingly heartfelt novel about learning to live in a world where nearly everything is decided behind our backs.

    Sniper shootings throughout the D.C. area have everyone on edge and trying to make sense of these random acts of violence. Meanwhile, Craig and Lio are just trying to make sense of their lives. Craig’s crushing on quiet, distant Lio, and preoccupied with what it meant when Lio kissed him...and if he’ll do it again...and if kissing Lio will help him finally get over his ex-boyfriend, Cody.Lio feels most alive when he's with Craig. He forgets about his broken family, his dead brother, and the messed up world. But being with Craig means being vulnerable...and Lio will have to decide whether love is worth the risk.This intense, romantic novel from the author of Break and Invincible Summer is a poignant look at what it is to feel needed, connected, and alive.

    Peter, a gifted pianist, is everything to Sophie: best friend, musical collaborator, secret crush. When she learns she’s a match, donating a kidney is an easy, obvious choice. She can’t help wondering if after the transplant, he’ll love her back the way she’s always wanted.But Peter’s life post-transplant isn’t what either of them expected. Though he once had feelings for Sophie too, he’s now drawn to Chase, the guitarist in a band that happens to be looking for a keyboardist. And while neglected parts of Sophie’s world are calling to her—dance opportunities, new friends, a sister and niece she barely knows—she longs for a now-distant Peter more than ever, growing increasingly bitter he doesn’t seem to feel the same connection.Peter fears he’ll forever be indebted to her. Sophie isn’t sure who she is without him. Then one blurry, heartbreaking night twists their relationship into something neither of them recognizes, leading them to question their past, their future, and whether their friendship is even worth fighting for.

     Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, two ranch hands, come together when they're working as sheepherder and camp tender one summer on a range above the tree line. At first, sharing an isolated tent, the attraction is casual, inevitable, but something deeper catches them that summer. Both men work hard, marry, and have kids because that's what cowboys do. But over the course of many years and frequent separations this relationship becomes the most important thing in their lives, and they do anything they can to preserve it. The New Yorker won the National Magazine Award for Fiction for its publication of "Brokeback Mountain," and the story was included in Prize Stories 1998: The O. Henry Awards. In gorgeous and haunting prose, Proulx limns the difficult, dangerous affair between two cowboys that survives everything but the world's violent intolerance.

    That is until he meets the outspoken and cheerful Taichi. He tells Kohei that his hearing loss is not his fault. Taichi's words cut through Kohei's usual defense mechanisms and open his heart. More than friends, less than lovers, their relationship changes Kohei forever.

    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.

    and a small boy very worried.Lydia Weekes is distraught at the break-up of her marriage. When her young son, Charlie, makes friends with the local doctor, Jean Markham, her life is turned upside down.Charlie tells his secrets to no one but the bees, but even he can't keep his mother's friendship to himself. The locals don't like things done differently. As Lydia and the doctor become closer, the rumours start to fly and threaten to shatter Charlie's world.

    Despite his upbringing in working-class Melbourne, he knows that his astonishing ability in the swimming pool has the potential to transform his life. Everything Danny has ever done, every sacrifice his family has ever made, has been in pursuit of this dream--but what happens when the talent that makes you special fails you? When the goal that you’ve been pursuing for as long as you can remember ends in humiliation and loss? Twenty years later, Dan is in Scotland, terrified to tell his partner about his past, afraid that revealing what he has done will make him unlovable. Haunted by shame, Dan relives the intervening years he spent in prison, where the optimism of his childhood was completely foreign.