Book picks similar to
Decade Dance by Michael Lassell


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Written on the Body


Jeanette Winterson - 1992
    In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille. I like to keep my body rolled away from prying eyes, never unfold too much, tell the whole story. I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book.

A Big Straight Wedding


Sienna Waters - 2021
    Marry her best friend George and they'll both get access to his trust fund.Okay, there are a few hitches. George's mother hates her for being Latina. She's gay, not straight. Oh, and then there's Klara. The wedding planner.Klara gives her heart to every woman she meets, so it's no surprise that she harbors a crush on Nic. But her failing business needs this wedding and she can't afford to screw it up. So why can't she keep her hands off the blushing bride?Money, business, friendship, everyone's got something to lose. But when hearts are on the line, the stakes just can't get any bigger. Or can they?A Big Straight Wedding is a new stand-alone lesbian romance from Sienna Waters, the author of The Wrong Date and the Oakview and Monday's Child series

Please Come Off-Book (Button Poetry)


Kevin Kantor - 2021
    Kantor critiques the treatment of queer figures and imagines a braver and bolder future that allows queer voices the agency over their own stories.Drawing upon elements of the Aristotelian dramatic structure and the Hero's Journey, Please Come Off-Book is both a love letter to and a scathing critique of American culture and the lenses we choose to see ourselves through.

A Thirsty Evil


Gore Vidal - 1956
    Meanwhile, in 'Erlinda and Mr Coffin', Southern etiquette is unashamedly turned upside down in a tale of amateur theatricals reminiscent of Dickens and Victorian melodrama. Yet it is in 'Three Stratagems', 'The Zenner Trophy', 'Pages from an Abandoned Journal' and 'The Ladies in the Library' (with more than a hint of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice in the latter) that we see Vidal as we know him best: cynical and provocative in these subtle tales of what was known in those days as 'sexual inversion'.

Rapture


Carol Ann Duffy - 2005
    Carol Ann Duffy's 'Rapture' is about the loss and rediscovery of love in all its aspects - erotic, intellectual, emotional.

The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories


David Leavitt - 1994
    A collection of fiction by and about gay men features original stories from Larry Kramer, Edmund White, Christopher Coe, Michael Cunningham, and other writers and explores the tragedies and triumphs of AIDS.

A Shropshire Lad


A.E. Housman - 1896
    E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad, first published in 1896. Scholars and critics have seen in these timeless poems an elegance of taste and perfection of form and feeling comparable to the greatest of the classic. Yet their simple language, strong musical cadences and direct emotional appeal have won these works a wide audience among general readers as well.This finely produced volume, reprinted from an authoritative edition of A Shropshire Lad, contains all 63 original poems along with a new Index of First Lines and a brief new section of Notes to the Text. Here are poems that deal poignantly with the changing climate of friendship, the fading of youth, the vanity of dreams — poems that are among the most read, shared, and quoted in our language.

Scissors, Paper, Rock


Fenton Johnson - 1993
    Before, he had always brought men with him on his visits, lovers with whom his mother had been “civil, even flirtatious,” while his father retreated into his sacred woodshop. Now his mother has died and, at age thirty-six, Raphael has come back to see his dying father, who knows and disapproves of Raphael’s boyfriends but who is unaware that this, his youngest child, may be ill as well. Raphael’s halting, often painful attempt to reconcile with his father forms the centerpiece of Fenton Johnson’s astonishing novel. At times funny, at times heartbreakingly poignant, Scissors, Paper, Rock explores with wisdom and humor the many kinds of family, the infinite varieties of love. Through the intricately interwoven stories of the Hardin parents and children, Scissors, Paper, Rock contrasts the families we inherit — our blood ties — with the families we choose, our partners in love and our friends.

Twenty One Love Poems


Adrienne Rich - 1976
    

The Truth About Keeping Secrets


Savannah Brown - 2019
    Sydney's dad is the only psychiatrist for miles around their small Ohio town.He is also unexpectedly dead.Is Sydney crazy, or is it kind of weird that her dad-a guy whose entire job revolved around other peoples' secrets-crashed alone, with no explanation?And why is June Copeland, homecoming queen and the town's golden child, at his funeral?As the two girls grow closer in the wake of the accident, it's clear that not everyone is happy about their new friendship.But what is picture perfect June still hiding? And does Sydney even want to know? THE TRUTH ABOUT KEEPING SECRETS is a page-turning, voice led, high school thriller.

Destiny: Valentine's on Emerald Mountain


Cara Malone - 2022
    Single and recently scorned, she’s dreading the next two weeks of couple’s massages, wine tastings and moonlight walks surrounded by people in love. Even the staff are hot and flirty… or maybe that’s just Haley’s heartache talking.But when a white-out catches Haley unprepared and underdressed, romance is the least of her worries.She’s disoriented and shivering when someone reaches through the storm and pulls her into an unoccupied cabin. As the blizzard rages outside, Haley meets her savior—the admirer she’d noticed before, a tall, dark and handsome woman named Destiny. And those sultry looks? Haley wasn’t imagining them.Des builds a fire in the hearth and kindles another in Haley’s core. Snowed in on Valentine’s Day, Haley can’t resist Cupid’s arrow—or Des herself. At least until the storm lets up.

Ivory Gleam


Priya Dolma Tamang - 2018
    A potpourri of musings assembled with a hint of practical spirituality, to be savoured passably as an oracle of hearts to the many answers, whose questions our minds are yet to comprehend. Ivory Gleam is split into three chapters of learning, longing and loving. Each chapter is a journey traversing a different road to the ultimate destination of self-reflection.

I Felt a Funeral, In My Brain


Will Walton - 2018
    And you write it all down in an attempt to understand what's happened -- and is happening -- to you.I Felt a Funeral, In My Brain is an astonishing novel about navigating death and navigating life, at a time when the only map you have is the one you can draw for yourself.

Madness


Sam Sax - 2017
    These brave, formally dexterous poems examine antiquated diagnoses and procedures from hysteria to lobotomy; offer meditations on risky sex; and take up the poet's personal and family histories as mental health patients and practitioners. Ultimately, Madness attempts to build a queer lineage out of inherited language and cultural artifacts; these poems trouble the static categories of sanity, heterosexuality, masculinity, normality, and health. sax's innovative collection embodies the strange and disjunctive workings of the mind as it grapples to make sense of the world around it.

The Late Parade: Poems


Adam Fitzgerald - 2013
    Channeling "the primal vision of Hart Crane" (Harold Bloom), Adam Fitzgerald helped welcome the modernist aethetic into the twenty-first century. Part Technicolor, part nitrous oxide, Fitzgerald's chimerical poems confront "a surging ocean of sound and language" (Maureen McLane). In these forty-eight poems, he conducts a madcap symphony of language, memory, and fantasy with the "exhilarating assurance of nonstop invention" (Timothy Donnelly).