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An Arrow's Flight is a joyous and eccentric tour-de-force by the author of American Studies and Man About Town. The siege of Troy has dragged on for ten years, with no end in sight, when an oracle supplies the Greeks with the recipe for victory. All they need is Pyrrhus, son of the fallen Achilles. But Pyrrhus has been putting his godlike form to profitable use as a go-go dancer in the big city. Why should he leave the party, give up his hard-bought freedom, just because some voice in a jar says he must strap on a suit of hand-me-down armor? Still, he has always known destiny had plans for him, some more glittering future than life as a used-up hustler on a park bench somewhere. So he sails ...
Mark Merlis' exceptional first novel. Dark humour, biting wit and dazzling prose infuse this story of desire and betrayal, history and healing. Reeve thinks his life is over. His career is at a dead end, his face is a mess, and his landlord is evicting him from his aprartment because he made too much noise when a hustler beat him up. As he lies in his hospital bed, figuring our what to do next. he finds himself brooding about the parallel ruin of his old college mentor Tom Slater, a famous American literary scholar who was betrayed and driven to suicide during the McCarthy era. Offering a welcome distraction is the patient in the next bed, a slient youth who arouses feelings Reeve vowed he would renounce, the dangerous longing for the sweetness and menace of straight men. Never at a loss for the tellling of caustic aside, Reeve reconstructs the troubled worlds of Tom Slater and his own insouciant youth, and horny old age. American Studies is an ambitiously achieved sweep of twentieth-century experience, a novel which triumphantly succeeds as both tragedy and farce.
Pyrrhus is a male stripper in a bar in ancient Greece. But destiny has scheduled him for a career change. For Pyrrhus is the son of Achilles, and the oracle has proclaimed that he will lead the Myrmidons to victory.
A poignant and satirical tale of one man's struggle to overcome the ghosts of his past and make sense of the present. In this, his third novel, acclaimed author Mark Merlis artfully intertwines the pathos of loneliness with a subtle critique of the American political machine. Joel Lingeman has it all: an overpaid sinecure advising Congress, a fifteen-year partnership with a perfectly adequate lover, a cosy circle of drinking buddies. Until one day his world implodes. His lover runs off, working for Congress starts to seem like a felony instead of a privilege, and Joel is hurled back into the dating game he couldn't manage twenty years earlier. Amid the rubble he finds himself clinging to an ...
Dashingly told and meticulously researched, this double biography of D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda von Richthofen is the first to draw fully on Frieda s unpublished letters and on interviews with people who knew her well. It explores their collision with an industrial world they hated and chronicles the stormy relationship between husband and wife. The strong sexual vitality that inspired Lawrence s art brought both joy and anguish to his marriage. Here, the Lawrences emerge as proud but not conceited in their unconventional lives, staunch in the face of fierce opposition from a conformist society. Living at the Edge follows the separate lives of Lawrence and Frieda up to their first me...
Queer Retrosexualities: The Politics of ReparativeReturn examines the retrospective logic that informs contemporary queer thinking; specifically the narrative return to the 1950s in post-1990s queer and LGBT culture in the United States. The term “Queer Retrosexuality” marks the intersection between retrospective thinking and queerness—to illustrate not only how to “queer” retrospection, but also how retrospection, in some senses can be thought of as always already queer. This book examines the historical possibilities that inform the narrative return to the 1950s in queer cultural and literary productions such as Samuel Delany’s The Motion of Light in Water, Todd Haynes’s Far ...
This “standard text of the defining era of gay literati” tells the cultural history of the interconnected lives of the 20th century's most influential gay writers (Philadelphia Inquirer). In the years following World War II a group of gay writers established themselves as major cultural figures in American life. Truman Capote, the enfant terrible, whose finely wrought fiction and nonfiction captured the nation's imagination. Gore Vidal, the wry, withering chronicler of politics, sex, and history. Tennessee Williams, whose powerful plays rocketed him to the top of the American theater. James Baldwin, the harrowingly perceptive novelist and social critic. Christopher Isherwood, the English...
Carry Iverson needs a change of pace from his predictable life in Ohio. He takes a position with a social justice firm in Austin and rents a cottage on Lake Travis. At a bewildering dinner with his cousin, Donovan, his wife, Fallon, and an alluring transgender man, Levi, Carry discovers his neighbor is a wealthy and mysterious man who has everyone talking. Carry’s curiosity turns into attraction after meeting the flirtatious Jacobi at one of his parties. But Jacobi has a secret desire of his own: he is in love with Donovan. Now Carry finds himself caught in the middle of a reckless love triangle with Fallon, who is hellbent on destroying Jacobi to keep her wayward husband from straying. Passion and jealousy reach a fever pitch when the carefully designed lives of Carry, Donovan, Fallon, and Levi unravel. This provocative and explosive story is about what happens at the intersection of obsession and tragedy and explores the frailty of hope and agony over what could have been but never was, two forces that pull us into lives that we were never meant to live.
It's a tough time to be a scientist: universities are shuttering science departments, federal funding agencies are facing flat budgets, and many newspapers have dropped their science sections altogether. But according to Marc Kuchner, this antiscience climate doesn't have to equal a career death knell-it just means scientists have to be savvier about promoting their work and themselves. In Marketing for Scientists, he provides clear, detailed advice about how to land a good job, win funding, and shape the public debate. As an astrophysicist at NASA, Kuchner knows that "marketing" can seem like a superficial distraction, whether your daily work is searching for new planets or seeking a cure f...
Told in dreamlike fragments, Manbug unfolds as a love story between Sebastian, an entomologist with Asperger's Syndrome, and Tom, a spiritual bisexual who may or may not be recruiting Sebastian for a cult. They explore the world through their relationship, seeking meaning and value in themselves through the other. They also try to avoid the inevitable toxins around them, both real and imagined - like bugs avoid insecticide - while asking the question, Just how much poison can any of us absorb?