Ackerley as “a fairy tale for adults.” Frank, the narrator, is a middle-aged civil servant, intelligent, acerbic, self-righteous, angry. He is in love with Johnny, a young, married, working-class man with a sweetly easygoing nature. When Johnny is sent to prison for committing a petty theft, Frank gets caught up in a struggle with Johnny’s wife and parents for access to him. Their struggle finds a strange focus in Johnny’s dog—a beautiful but neglected German shepherd named Evie. And it is she, in the end, who becomes the improbable and undeniable guardian of Frank’s inner world.

    But under the surface was a wild instability. The only child of parents continually battling drug and alcohol addictions, Madden confronted her environment alone. Facing a culture of assault and objectification, she found lifelines in the desperately loving friendships of fatherless girls.With unflinching honesty and lyrical prose, spanning from 1960s Hawai'i to the present-day struggle of a young woman mourning the loss of a father while unearthing truths that reframe her reality, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls is equal parts eulogy and love letter. It's a story about trauma and forgiveness, about families of blood and affinity, both lost and found, unmade and rebuilt, crooked and beautiful.

    In matters of the heart, he assumed it would be no different. It is quite a shock when he falls in love for the first time, to find his desire is unrequited. But he will have his way — even if he has to cheat, lie and plot.

    Now Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of Birds of a Lesser Paradise, resurrects these women, lets them live in the reader's imagination, so we can explore their difficult choices. Nearly every story in this dazzling collection is based on a woman who attained some celebrity—she raced speed boats or was a conjoined twin in show business; a reclusive painter of renown; a member of the first all-female, integrated swing band. We see Lord Byron's illegitimate daughter, Allegra; Oscar Wilde's troubled niece, Dolly; West With the Night author Beryl Markham; Edna St. Vincent Millay's sister, Norma. These extraordinary stories travel the world, explore the past (and delve into the future), and portray fiercely independent women defined by their acts of bravery, creative impulses, and sometimes reckless decisions.The world hasn't always been kind to unusual women, but through Megan Mayhew Bergman's alluring depictions they finally receive the attention they deserve. Almost Famous Women is a gorgeous collection from an "accomplished writer of short fiction" (Booklist).

    Some 50 years later, author Carolyn Wood embarks on a solo pilgrimage to walk the 500 miles of the Camino de Santiago in an attempt to reclaim her "inner tough girl" as she reflects on coming out as gay in the 1970s after a brief marriage and motherhood, and the disillusionment and loss she experiences when her 30-year relationship suddenly ends. After several failed attempts at learning to swim, young Carolyn Wood finally conquers her fears and dives into unknown waters. By 1958 she sets a goal to make the 1960 Olympic team and, along with teammates and competitors, begins the arduous road to Rome. Losses, pain, fear, and fatigue accompany the rambunctious athlete as she finds her way through athletic training, school, and dealing with social gender expectations as she realizes she's gay. Tough Girl artfully weaves Wood's life story around the tale of her long walk on the Camino de Santiago, an effort to tap into her tough girl resilience so she can begin to accept the end of her long marriage. The ups and downs of Carolyn's childhood road to the Olympics as well as her journey on the Camino, will thrill and inspire readers.

    They live in a closeted community, and little is known about their way of life. After centuries of persecution Gypsies are wary of outsiders and if you choose to leave you can never come back.This is something Mikey knows only too well.Growing up, he rarely went to school, and seldom mixed with non-Gypsies. The caravan and camp were his world.But although Mikey inherited a vibrant and loyal culture his family’s legacy was bittersweet with a hidden history of grief and abuse.Eventually Mikey was forced to make an agonising decision – to stay and keep secrets, or escape and find somewhere he could truly belong.

    Kyle has found through his personal psychic practice and work with the angels that when people are experiencing difficulties, there is one topic that helps click everything else into place – forgiveness. Forgiveness is not an easy subject, but it is a necessary focus in spirituality and personal growth. In this book, the reader is taken on a journey – not outside of themselves, but within. Drawing on many spiritual texts, including A Course in Miracles and The Gnostic Gospels, Kyle shows that we truly are all held and cherished by the divine, and makes these sacred concepts more accessible for his 21st-century readers. Together with the angels, he will show you how to call in the power of heaven to help you forgive, release all that no longer serves you and experience joy and peace.

    She never knew her biological father, and while her mother and stepfather were loving parents, the situation was sometimes chaotic. While still a teenager, she met the love of her life. They were wed at 20, and the first of three children followed shortly. Jetté Knox finally had the stability she craved--or so it seemed. Their middle child struggled with depression and avoided school. The author was unprepared when the child she knew as her son came out as transgender at the age of eleven. Jetté Knox became an ardent advocate for trans rights.For many years, the author had coped with her spouse's moodiness, but that chronic unhappiness was taking a toll on their marriage. A little over a year after their child came out, her partner also came out as transgender. Knowing better than most what would lie ahead, Jetté Knox searched for positive examples of marriages surviving transition. When she found no role models, she determined that her family would become one.The shift was challenging, but slowly the family members noticed that they were becoming happier and more united. Love Lives Here is a story of transition, frustration, support, acceptance, and, of course, love.

    . . . "Social Disease" . . . is really about the three major issues of our time: sex, hair, and the telephone" (Paul Rudnick, "New York Magazine").

    Brown’s poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we’ve become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive. Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Brown’s mastery, and his invention of the duplex―a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues―testament to his formal skill. The Tradition is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while revelling in a celebration of contradiction.

    By the age of seventeen, Sam Lansky was an all-star student with Ivy League aspirations in his final year at an elite New York City prep school. But a nasty addiction to prescription pills spiraled rapidly out of control, compounded by a string of reckless affairs with older men, leaving his bright future in jeopardy. After a terrifying overdose, he tried to straighten out. Yet as he journeyed from the glittering streets of Manhattan, to a wilderness boot camp in Utah, to a psych ward in New Orleans, he only found more opportunities to create chaos—until finally, he began to face himself.In the vein of Elizabeth Wurtzel and Augusten Burroughs, Lansky scrapes away at his own life as a young addict and exposes profoundly universal anxieties. Told with remarkable sensitivity, biting humor, and unrelenting self-awareness, The Gilded Razor is a coming-of-age story of searing honesty and lyricism that introduces a powerful new voice to the confessional genre.

    Here, on a locked adolescent psychiatric ward, Keith meets the bewitching Laura. The two teens begin a passionate love affair--only to be separated and placed in different hospitals.By turns lyrical, funny, and poignant, and always informed by touching candor, The Boy with the Thorn in His Side is full of fascinating characters and unexpected twists-at once an odyssey into the extremes of the American 1970s, a universal tale of star-crossed teenage love, and an account of a deeply sensitive young person's struggle to find his place in the world. It marks the debut of a poised and compelling writer.Keith Fleming had been a pretty ordinary Midwestern kid--Little League, Boy Scouts--but the year he turns twelve, his family is torn apart by divorce when he learns that his mother and his Uncle Ed are both gay. By the time Keith is fifteen he has become disfigured by severe acne and is so wild that his father and stepmother place him in a draconian adolescent mental institution. Here he meets Laura, a pretty Mexican girl with whom he begins a passionate love affair.Keith's mother finally demands his release after a series of hospitalizations and sends him off to live with his uncle, Edmund White, in New York. Keith is soon transformed by his young uncle: He is sent to a dermatologist, to Barneys "Boy's Town" for new clothes, and to prep school. He receives a broad cultural education from Uncle Ed at home--all this despite Ed's being poor as well as completely caught up in the beehive of social and sexual activity of 1970s gay Manhattan. In the tradition of This Boy's Life and Girl, Interrupted, The Boy with a Thorn in His Side is a beautifully rendered saga of a deeply sensitive and alienated teen struggling to find his place in the world-and at the same time a very modern tale of teenage love and a young person's touching and complicated bond with an unlikely hero.

    . . . [He can] fascinate us with the range and depth of his mind."--San Francisco ChronicleA New York Times Notable Book of the Year  "One of the great pleasures of this book lies in watching Sullivan's mind at work . . . [his essays] are filled with a passion and heat that most cultural criticism lacks." --Katie Roiphe, The Washington PostWhen former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan publicly revealed his HIV positive status in 1996, he intended "to be among the first generation that survives this disease." In this new book, a powerful meditation on the spiritual effect AIDS has on friendship, love, sexuality, and American culture, we follow Sullivan on his path to survival.   A practicing Catholic, Sullivan reflects on his faith in God, and expresses his bittersweet joy upon learning about new AIDS treatments that he believes led to the virus's recent transformation from a plague into a chronic illness. He revisits Freud to seek the origins of homosexuality and reviews the works of Aristotle, St. Augustine, and W. H. Auden to define friendship for a contemporary, post-plague world. Sullivan's last essay extols the virtues of friendship, elevating platonic love over the romantic, as he memorializes his best friend, who died of AIDS.  Intensely personal and passionately political, Sullivan's essays are not just about his own experiences but also a powerful testament to human resilience, faith, hope, and love.  "Sullivan has found meaning in chaos. . . . With its paradoxical sense of beauty amid pain, Love Undetectable has something of the quality of a war memoir."  --The New York Times Book Review  "On display here are all of the author's many strengths--compelling, poetic prose style, some keen observations on faith. . . . Sullivan offers a moving defense of the open gay male urban sexual culture and his participation in it."  --The Boston Globe

    Burns was born in Massachusetts, graduated from Andover and Harvard, and went on to teach English at the Loomis School, a boarding school for boys in Windsor, Connecticut. During World War II, he was stationed in Africa and Italy, and worked mainly in military intelligence. His first novel, The Gallery (1947), based on his wartime experiences, is a critically acclaimed novel and one of the first to unflinchingly depict gay life in the military. The Gallery sold half a million copies upon publication, but never again would Burns receive that kind of critical or popular attention. Dreadful follows Burns, from his education at the best schools to his final years of drinking and depression in Italy. With intelligence and insight, David Margolick examines Burns’s moral ambivalence toward the behavior of American soldiers stationed with him in Naples, and the scandal surrounding his second novel, Lucifer with a Book, an unflattering portrayal of his experiences at Loomis.

    Beau joins Arden, the black retriever, to complete their family. As Beau bounds back into life, the two dogs become Mark Doty's intimate companions, his solace, and eventually the very life force that keeps him from abandoning all hope during the darkest days. Their tenacity, loyalty, and love inspire him when all else fails.Dog Years is a remarkable work: a moving and intimate memoir interwoven with profound reflections on our feelings for animals and the lessons they teach us about life, love, and loss. Mark Doty writes about the heart-wrenching vulnerability of dogs, the positive energy and joy they bring, and the gift they bear us of unconditional love. A book unlike any other, Mark Doty's surprising meditation is radiantly unsentimental yet profoundly affecting. Beautifully written, Dog Years is a classic in the making.