Since I was introduced to many authors published by Grove Press, I have been intrigued by transgressive literary fiction, especially stories and novels that feature narrators and protagonists whose unreliability and moral culpability fuel plots to surprising yet inevitable climaxes. Lesser writers of such works use the shocking and revolting as crutches for vapid prose, failing to lead readers to revelations that can be found in the darkest places and in the unlikeliest of people. What better accomplishment can any writer ask for except getting readers, in some way, to identify with characters whom they would avoid in real life?
Guideis the fourth book in Cooper’s George Miles Cycle. This short novel is packed with so much to think about, even if what that includes will make your skin crawl.
If you are unfamiliar with Cooper’s work, this isn’t the book I’d recommend you start with, but his language is so precise that it’s hard to imagine the sentences being written in any other way. The shifting POV chapters take readers on a tour of the seedier parts of L.A., forcing us to examine and interrogate not only how we all tell our own stories, but also how some people then use those to erase or justify their complicity.
Presents a disturbing and provocative exploration of four young men who want more than anything to be altered by drugs, the power of love, or the violently erotic experiences they share with each other.
I’m an avid reader of queer literary fiction not only because I write it but because I’m looking to see my life experience captured on the page. As a gay man, a father of two young boys, and one-half of an interracial married couple, I know the complexity of modern queer living firsthand. In recent years, I’ve been astounded by the breadth of great LGBTQ+ books that examine queerness fully and empathetically. I seek out these books, I read them feverishly, and I become a champion for the best ones. In an era of intense book banning, it’s so important to me to elevate these books and their authors.
Like so many of the books I love, this book isn’t afraid to show a queer couple in distress.
I love this book for its brutality, its interracial couple and the dynamics that entails, for its detour to Japan, for its scrumptious descriptions of food, and its emphasis on food as a means of connection.
It’s beautiful, honest, raw, and contemporary in all the best ways.
'This feels like a vision for the 21st-century novel... It made me happy' Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Benson and Mike are two young guys who have been together for a few years - good years - but now they're not sure why they're still a couple. There's the sex, sure, and the meals Mike cooks for Benson, and, well, they love each other. But when Mike finds out his estranged father is dying in Osaka just as his acerbic Japanese mother, Mitsuko, arrives for a visit, Mike picks…
Another
incredibly frank book that buzzed with energy and excitement from the outset.
Elton
John has rightly become a legend of the music and cultural scene across the
globe. His insights into what was often a world of excess are quite mind-blowing.
I loved Me from first to last, and it still amazes me how he survived it
all!
In his first and only official autobiography, music icon Elton John reveals the truth about his extraordinary life. Me is the joyously funny, honest and moving story of the most enduringly successful singer/songwriter of all time.
The Sunday Times bestseller with a new chapter bringing the story up to date.
'The rock memoir of the decade' - Daily Mail 'The rock star's gloriously entertaining and candid memoir is a gift to the reader' - Sunday Times ______________
Christened Reginald Dwight, he was a shy boy with Buddy Holly glasses who grew up in the London suburb of Pinner and dreamed…
Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison is an author, Soto Zen teacher, and Jungian psychotherapist. Koshin co-founded the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care, which offers contemplative approaches to care through education, personal caregiving, and Zen practice. He is the author of Wholehearted: Slow Down, Help Out, Wake Up. And the co-editor of Awake at the Bedside: Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End of Life Care. He is a recognized Zen teacher by the Soto Zen Buddhist Association, White Plum Asanga, and American Zen Teachers Association.
This book inspired my own integration of service and Zen. Issan Dorsey is a person who did not hold back. This portrait of a teacher whose creativity, love, honesty, joy, and compassion continues to awaken new possibilities for engaged Buddhism.
Drag queen. Prostitute. Drug addict. American bodhisattva.
These words describe the unlikely persona of Issan Dorsey, one of the most beloved teachers to emerge in American Zen. From his early days as a gorgeous female impersonator to the LSD experiences that set him on the spiritual path, Issan's life was never conventional. In 1989, after twenty years of Zen practice, he became the Founding Abbot of San Francisco's Hartford Street Zen Center, where he established Maitri Hospice for AIDS patients. Featuring Bernie Glassman's foreword to the second edition, as well as a new foreword by Koshin Paley Ellison, Street Zen…
I read E.M. Forster's long-suppressed novel, Maurice, in college. It was the tale of an aristocratic university
student in Edwardian England — the titular Maurice — who falls in love with a
poor gamekeeper named Alec. Although Maurice and Alec ended up with each other
at the end of the first book, I always questioned how their relationship could
survive in repressive England.Alec is a modern
sequel that attempts to answer just that.
As a working-class man, Alec enjoys
some personal freedom in a society that thinks and expects very little of him.
Yet maintaining a secretive gay relationship proves even more complicated when
a world war interferes.
Written in an explicitly honest voice, this is probably
the book about being gay and British that Forster could never have imagined
writing.
William di Canzio's Alec, inspired by Maurice, E. M. Forster's secret novel of a happy same-sex love affair, tells the story of Alec Scudder, the gamekeeper Maurice Hall falls in love with in Forster's classic, published only after the author's death.
Di Canzio follows their story past the end of Maurice to the front lines of battle in World War I and beyond. Forster, who tried to write an epilogue about the future of his characters, was stymied by the radical change that the Great War brought to their world. With the hindsight of a century, di Canzio imagines a…
I am someone who has lived a number of different lives. Although I loved being a father and husband I knew I wasn’t being authentic. At 45 that all changed utterly when I finally came out as gay – and accepted myself for perhaps the very first time in my life. However, even before coming out I was a professional writer – it was my only way to make sense of the world. But I also knew that although a successful writer I wasn’t a truthful one – and the most beautiful thing in life is discovering your own truth, isn’t it? Join me here in a safe space to experience yours.
Part manifesto, part archive of a fascinating and alluring sub-culture, Geoff Mains's book explores the possibilities of extreme encounters through pain/pleasure, BDSM, and role play in the leather community.
It’s not sensationalist although it examines ideas around sensation. It celebrates performance whilst honoring intimacy. It’s a book that would offer a reader of every sexuality an insight into some of their own fantasies and how to access them safely, and meaningfully.
I read it like I would read an exhaustive and tempting menu – picking out items I might like to taste myself and learning a great deal in the process.
A subculture of gay men participate in a radical form of sexuality and community known as leather. Through intimate forms of encounter, using such tools as pain-pleasure, bondage, and role-play, leather can bring a shift of conciousness and a new vision of the self. This innovative book pioneered in sensitively exploring and celebrating leathersexuality. As relevant today as when it was written 20 years ago, Urban Aboriginals is an intimate view of the gay male leather community. Within its pages, author Geoff Mains explores the spritual, sexual, emotional, cultural and physiological aspects that make this "scene" one of the most…
I grew up in a culture that both fears and embraces spirits or outrightly rejects the idea that spirits live on beyond death. I grew up on stories of rolling calves and duppies that caused havoc among the living. Since then, I’ve been fascinated by what haunts us—whether it be our familial spirits that float among the living and continue to play a role in our lives, our memories, or our past actions. I’ve written three books that play with this idea of past actions lingering long into the characters’ lives and returning in unexpected ways.
Sri Lankan photojournalist Maali Almeida is stuck in purgatory and determined to find out how he died. Maali is no saint, and his questionable antics—both his sexual exploits and the questionable work he took on during Sri Lanka’s civil war—come back to haunt him as he slips in and out of places he had been when he was alive.
I loved the irreverence, the humor, and the insights into a civil war I knew little about and I was endlessly fascinated by the portrayal of purgatory and the afterlife.
Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida-war photographer, gambler, and closet queen-has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the serene Beira Lake and he has no idea who killed him. In a country where scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers, and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long, as the ghouls and ghosts with grudges who cluster round can attest. But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali. He has seven moons to contact the man and woman he loves most and lead them to…
I’ve known all my life that I am gay. At age 50 I decided to try my hand at writing. After an image of two men kissing in a 1920s vehicle landed in my head, I began writing my Medicine for the Bluestrilogy (Acquaintanceis book one). But knowing nothing about LGBT history, I began a deep dive into gay and lesbian history, into the history of Portland and Oregon, into the era of the 1920s, the KKK, Prohibition, Freud, eugenics, and more. During 20 years of writing the trilogy, I’ve read dozens of books that roiled through my imagination and the information spilled out in the story.
This book was essential background for my trilogy. What I like most is its descriptions of the different sex practices of the different homosexual “types”—lower/working class men (“trade” or “wolves”) preferred anal intercourse with boys or young men (“punks” or “lambs”); upper class men preferred oral sex with “queens” or “fairies.” Focusing on the Pacific Northwest of the USA, Boag does great research into criminal and court records, which were some of the only records of these “aberrant” activities. A bonus is Boag’s tracing of the influence of the Oscar Wilde trial (1895) on attitudes in the Western USA.
At the turn of the twentieth century, two distinct, yet at times overlapping, male same-sex sexual subcultures had emerged in the Pacific Northwest: one among the men and boys who toiled in the region's logging, fishing, mining, farming, and railroad-building industries; the other among the young urban white-collar workers of the emerging corporate order. Boag draws on police logs, court records, and newspaper accounts to create a vivid picture of the lives of these men and youths - their sexual practices, cultural networks, cross-class relations, variations in rural and urban experiences, and ethnic and racial influences.
As an author of historical fiction, I have a number of time periods that I go back to again and again. Both the 1960s (specifically, the late 1960s) and the 1990s are two of those eras that I just can’t get enough of. The parallels between these two time periods are very compelling: both were times of political upheaval and amazing music, with young people leading the charge, hoping to create a better world than the one they were disenchanted with.
A wonderful coming-of-age novel set against the tumultuous backdrop of the Vietnam War.
Two young men are lucky enough to find kindred spirits in one another and then suddenly, they are wrenched apart – one off to college in Wisconsin, and the other drafted off to fight in the Vietnam War.
The two men take up a correspondence, leaning on each other and sharing their thoughts, fears, hopes, and dreams through the only avenue available to them: the written word. Their letters are a lifeline for both.
This novel is a journey through the heart and mind of two young disillusioned men who learn all about friendship and love through letters, finding themselves again through each other.
An LGBTQ coming of age story about fighting for someone you love, brought to life in this Vietnam War era historical fiction.
It seemed as though Anthony and Sam had just found each other, and now they were already being torn apart. Sam to college in Wisconsin; Anthony across the world fighting in the Vietnam War. Through their separate journeys, they discover themselves, and rely on the one way to share their secret together. Corresponding with secret messages, scary truths, and fears about the war, readers will follow Anthony and Sam’s path to friendship, love, and survival.
I’m a 54-year-old gay man who has led my own messy life here in New York City, marked as much by sex, romance, friendship, and culture as by drug addiction, relationship drama, mental illness and youthful trauma. I’ve published five novels, all of which contain queer characters who’ve not exactly been poster children for mainstream-world-approved LGBTQ behavior. I’m drawn to novels like the ones I’ve mentioned because they show queer people not as the hetero world often would like them to be—sanitized, asexual, witty and “fabulous”—but as capable of dysfunction, mediocrity, unwise choices and poor conduct as anybody else.
One of the most kinetic books I read a few years back and told in a kind of beautiful, white-hot stream of consciousness, Sketchtasy is the tale of young, genderqueer Alexa and her friends navigating pleasure and survival in mid-90s, AIDS-battered Boston.
This is no “model LGBTQ person” book; Alexa and her friends, scarred by trauma and addled by every recreational drug on the planet, are creatures of the night, showing off outrageous looks in the clubs and turning tricks to pay the rent and put food in their mouths.
It’s a breakneck-paced look at both exuberant and terrified young queer people right before HIV went from being a near death sentence to a chronic manageable disease.
Sketchtasy takes place in that late-night moment when everything comes together, and everything falls apart—it’s an urgent, glittering, devastating novel about the perils of queer world-making in the mid-‘90s.
This is Boston in 1995, a city defined by a rabid fear of difference. Alexa, an incisive twenty-one-year-old queen, faces everyday brutality with determined nonchalance. Rejecting middle-class pretensions, she negotiates past and present traumas with a scathing critique of the world. Drawn to the ecstasy of drugged-out escapades, Alexa searches for nourishment in a gay culture bonded by clubs and conformity, willful apathy, and the specter of AIDS. Is there any…
