PalimpsestIn the Cities of Coin and Spice and In the Night Garden introduced readers to the unique and intoxicating imagination of Catherynne M. Valente. Now she weaves a lyrically erotic spell of a place where the grotesque and the beautiful reside and the passport to our most secret fantasies begins with a stranger’s kiss.…
Between life and death, dreaming and waking, at the train stop beyond the end of the world is the city of Palimpsest. To get there is a miracle, a mystery, a gift, and a curse—a voyage permitted only to those who’ve always believed there’s another world than the one that meets the eye. Those fated to make the passage are marked forever by a map of that wondrous city tattooed on their flesh after a single orgasmic night. To this kingdom of ghost trains, lion-priests, living kanji, and cream-filled canals come four travelers: Oleg, a New York locksmith; the beekeeper November; Ludovico, a binder of rare books; and a young Japanese woman named Sei. They’ve each lost something important—a wife, a lover, a sister, a direction in life—and what they will find in Palimpsest is more than they could ever imagine.
Lynnee Breedlove's One Freak ShowThrough the unusual vehicle of gender-bending comedy, Lynn Breedlove boldly questions who truly owns and defines the body. Based on his critically acclaimed comedy performances, this amazing collection of thought-provoking writing is aimed at anyone prepared to laugh at their preconceptions about themselves and others. Whether Breedlove is commenting on LGTB terminology, offering heart-warming reflections on parenting or sharing his unique perspective on San Francisco's queer history, readers will instantly connect with his insights and humor.
Blue BoyMeet Kiran Sharma: lover of music, dance, and all things sensual; son of immigrants, social outcast, spiritual seeker. A boy who doesn't quite understand his lot — until he realizes he's a god...
As an only son, Kiran has obligations — to excel in his studies, to honor the deities, to find a nice Indian girl, and, above all, to make his mother and father proud — standard stuff for a boy of his background. If only Kiran had anything in common with the other Indian kids besides the color of his skin. They reject him at every turn, and his cretinous public schoolmates are no better. Cincinnati in the early 1990s isn't exactly a hotbed of cultural diversity, and Kiran's not-so-well-kept secrets don't endear him to any group. Playing with dolls, choosing ballet over basketball, taking the annual talent show way too seriously...the very things that make Kiran who he is also make him the star of his own personal freak show...
Surrounded by examples of upstanding Indian Americans — in his own home, in his temple, at the weekly parties given by his parents' friends — Kiran nevertheless finds it impossible to get the knack of "normalcy." And then one fateful day, a revelation: perhaps his desires aren't too earthly, but too divine. Perhaps the solution to the mystery of his existence has been before him since birth. For Kiran Sharma, a long, strange trip is about to begin — a journey so sublime, so ridiculous, so painfully beautiful, that it can only lead to the truth...
Lake OverturnEula, Idaho, has never seen a battle, an earthquake, or a Democrat in City Hall. Yet life here is anything but simple.
Lina's angry son JesÚs has recently returned to the trailer park after living with wealthy white foster parents. Her younger son Enrique and his best friend, Gene—who lives in a neighboring trailer with his very Christian mother, Connie—are misfits who cling to their studies in the face of schoolyard cruelties. Determined to win the statewide science fair, Enrique and Gene devise an experiment involving "lake overturn," a phenomenon in which deadly gases erupt from a lake's depths. In their endeavor to discover if Eula could suffer from such an event, the boys come into contact with an odd assortment of locals—including a frail-hearted school principal with grand ambitions, a lonely lawyer who finds new love as his wife is dying, and a woman who decides to escape a life of exploitation and addiction by becoming a surrogate mother.
With sweeping perspective and a Victorian wealth of character, Lake Overturn exposes small-town America in all its beauty and treachery, sunshine and secrets.
Ardent SpiritsIn his third volume of memoir, Reynolds Price explores six crucial years of his life -- his departure from home in 1955 to spend three years as a student at Oxford University; then his return to North Carolina to begin his long career as a university teacher.
He gives often moving, and frequently comic, portraits of his great teachers in England -- such men as Lord David Cecil, Nevill Coghill, and W. H. Auden, who was the most distinguished English-language poet of those years. In London the poet and editor Stephen Spender becomes his first publisher and a generous friend who introduces him to rewarding figures like the essayist Cyril Connolly and George Orwell's encouraging widow, Sonia. He spends rich months traveling in Britain and on the Continent; and above all he undergoes the first loves of his life -- one with an Oxford colleague whom he describes as a "romantic friend" and another with an older man.
Back in the States, in his first class at Duke he meets a startlingly gifted student in the sixteen-year-old Anne Tyler; and he soon combines the difficult pleasures of teaching English composition and literature with his own hard delight in learning to write a first novel. At the end of three lonely years, he completes the novel -- A Long and Happy Life -- and returns to England for a fourth year before his novel appears in Britain and America and meets with a success that sets the pace for an ongoing life of fiction, poetry, plays, essays, and translations (Ardent Spirits is his thirty-eighth volume).
The droll memories recorded here amount to the unsurpassed -- and, again, often comical -- story of a writer's beginnings; and the young man who emerges has proven his right to stand by his fellows of whatever sex and goal. Ardent Spirits is a book that penetrates deeply into the life of a writer, a teacher, and a steadfast lover.
Award-winning author Ford returns with his most ambitious novel to date, in which a father's disappearance has a profound effect on his three children and causes secrets and lies to be exposed.
Polito takes readers back to the 1980s with a wonderfully sweet and hilarious coming-of-age story set in the backstage world of a high school drama club.
Fifteen writers share their take on the phenomenon of Cowboys -- a calling, a vocation, and a status that has nothing to do with gender. Whether in the old west or the Australian outback, New England or the Great Plains, these girls and their horses work hard, play hard, and love hard. Contributors Radclyffe and Jove Bell depict the rough and tumble world of female rodeo riders, while Cheyenne Blue explores cattle ranching and the new environmentalism, and Delilah Devlin writes about a "Hired Hand" who may be a woman, but is more than a match for any man. Sexy, steamy, and crackling with the energy of a wild filly, these stories represent the cutting edge of lesbian cowboy fiction.
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