As She Climbed Across the Table


Jonathan Lethem - 1997
    Lady Chatterley left hers for the gamekeeper. Now Alice Coombs has her boyfriend for nothing … nothing at all.  Just how that should have come to pass and what Philip Engstrand, Alice’s spurned boyfriend, can do about it is the premise for this vertiginous speculative romance by the acclaimed author of Gun, with Occasional Music.Alice Coombs is a particle physicist, and she and her colleagues have created a void, a hole in the universe, that they have taken to calling Lack. But Lack is a nullity with taste — tastes; it absorbs a pomegranate, light bulbs, an argyle sock; it disdains a bow tie, an ice ax, and a scrambled duck egg. To Alice, this selectivity translates as an irresistible personality. To Philip, it makes Lack an unbeatable rival, for how can he win Alice back from something that has no flaws — because it has no qualities? Ingenious, hilarious, and genuinely mind-expanding, As She Climbed Across the Table is the best boy-meets-girl-meets-void story ever written.

Almost Like Being in Love


Steve Kluger - 2004
    They keep in touch at first, but then slowly drift apart.Flash forward twenty years.Travis and Craig both have great lives, careers, and loves. But something is missing .... Travis is the first to figure it out. He's still in love with Craig, and come what may, he's going after the boy who captured his heart, even if it means forsaking his job, making a fool of himself, and entering the great unknown. Told in narrative, letters, checklists, and more, this is the must-read novel for anyone who's wondered what ever happened to that first great love.

Giovanni's Room


James Baldwin - 1956
    In a 1950s Paris swarming with expatriates and characterized by dangerous liaisons and hidden violence, an American finds himself unable to repress his impulses, despite his determination to live the conventional life he envisions for himself. After meeting and proposing to a young woman, he falls into a lengthy affair with an Italian bartender and is confounded and tortured by his sexual identity as he oscillates between the two. Examining the mystery of love and passion in an intensely imagined narrative, Baldwin creates a moving and complex story of death and desire that is revelatory in its insight.

Pages for You


Sylvia Brownrigg - 2001
    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.

Eustace Chisholm and the Works


James Purdy - 1967
    A seedy Depression-era boardinghouse in Chicago plays host to a game of emotional chairs (Guardian) in a novel initially condemned for its frank depiction of abortion, homosexuality, and life on the margins of American society."

The Wives of Bath


Susan Swan - 1993
    Internationally acclaimed, Lost and Delirious, is based on the bestselling novel, directed by Lea Pool and starring .It is 1963. Mary Bradford (a.k.a. Mouse) is thirteen when she is shipped off to Bath Ladies College. Mouse, motherless, a hunchback, enters the school feeling very much on its margins, determined never to fit in with the "normal" girls, never to succumb to the expectations of the elder role models: the spinster teachers, the elegant mothers of her schoolmates. She chooses her allies carefully: her hump, whom she calls Alice, and John F. Kennedy, to whom she writes long letters asking and giving advice.But the school itself is stranger than Mouse ever could have imagined. A secret underworld of tunnels beneath the buildings, stolen love letters, King Kong worship, and ghostlike apparitions - a world where young girls sometimes refuse to be simply "good little girls" - all lead Mouse into experiences, both terrifying and exciting, of an alternate reality for her sex. What begins as experimentation spins out of control, ending in a death that only Mouse can fully comprehend.Susan Swan has created in Mouse Bradford - wise, witty and vulnerable - an unforgettable heroine. The Wives of Bath is a novel that both moves the heart an astonishes the imagination.The internationally acclaimed film adaptation of the novel, Lost and Delirious, was released in 2001. Directed by Lea Pool, starring Piper Perabo, Jessica Paré, and Mischa Barton. Available on DVD and in movie stores.

Twinkle Twinkle


Kaori Ekuni - 1991
    They haven't had sex yet and they don't intend to. As it turned out, the only way to make their parents get off their backs about trying to "find someone" was actually finding someone--with whom to put marriage for show. Mutsuki is strictly gay and has a boyfriend, while Shoko is a clinical case of emotional instability who's in no shape for a relationship. They've each found in the other a perfect partner for a sham marriage. Since the conspirators' parents know of their own child's undesirability, but not the spouse's, the union manages to please them. And while the newlyweds hope, in their own way, to live happily ever after, they inevitably come face to face with the fact that no marriage real or staged, is a fairy tale.

The Catch Trap


Marion Zimmer Bradley - 1979
    But Tommy's dreams, and talent, fly higher, up in the rigging with the trapeze. When rising star Mario Santelli offers him flying lessons, it looks like the start of wonderful new life, and to Tommy's surprise, his relationship with Mario deepens even as his skill soars in the rigging. But life in the 1940s forces them to keep their love a secret, and the stress pushes both Tommy and Mario to a precipice. And as Mario flies higher and higher, Tommy begins to wonder if it will always be his role to catch Mario as he falls.A tremendously moving tale, a rich family saga, a wise and compassionate portrait of a special love in a cruel world.

The End of Alice


A.M. Homes - 1996
    Here is the incredible story of an imprisoned pedophile who is drawn into an erotically charged correspondence with a nineteen-year-old suburban coed. As the two reveal—and revel in—their obsessive desires, Homes creates in The End of Alice a novel that is part romance, part horror story, at once unnerving and seductive.

Rubyfruit Jungle


Rita Mae Brown - 1973
    Bawdy and moving, the ultimate word-of-mouth bestseller, Rubyfruit Jungle is about growing up a lesbian in America--and living happily ever after.

Sarah


J.T. LeRoy - 2000
    Desperate to win her love, he decides to surpass her as the best and most famous lot lizard ever. With his own leather mini-skirt and a makeup bag that closes with Velcro, the young “Cherry Vanilla” embarks on a journey through the Appalachian wilds, dining on transcendental cuisine, supplicating to the mystical Jackalope, encountering the most terrifying of pimps, walking on water, being venerated as an innocent girl saint—and then being denounced as the devil. By turns exhilarating and shocking, magical and realistic, Sarah brings urgency, wit, and imagination to an unknown and unforgettable world.

Faggots


Larry Kramer - 1978
    The book is a fierce satire of the gay ghetto and a touching story of one man's desperate search for love there, and reading it today is a fascinating look at how much, and how little, has changed.

It's Our Prom (So Deal with It)


Julie Anne Peters - 2012
    Soon Azure manages to convince her best friends, Luke and Radhika, to join the prom committee as well.Facing heavy opposition and admittedly clueless about prom logistics, the three friends are nonetheless determined to succeed—if Luke's and Azure's secret crushes on Radhika don't push the committee members, and their friendships, to the breaking point first.Told in two voices and filled with comical missed connections, It's Our Prom (So Deal with It) explores the ups and downs of planning an alternative prom—while dealing with an unrequited crush on your best friend—and shines with National Book Award finalist Julie Anne Peters's unmistakable wit and insight.

Summer Fun


Jeanne Thornton - 2021
    She is obsessed with the Get Happies, the quintessential 1960s Californian band, helmed by its resident genius, B—-. Why did the band stop making music? Why did they never release their rumored album, Summer Fun?Gala writes letters to B—- that shed light not only on the Get Happies, but paint an extraordinary portrait of Gala. The parallel narratives of B—- and Gala form a dialogue about creation–of music, identity, self, culture, and counterculture.Summer Fun is an epic and magical work of trans literature that marks Thornton as one of our most exciting and original novelists.

The World of Normal Boys


K.M. Soehnlein - 2000
    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.