DENNIS COOPERUGLY MAN: STORIES The cult novelist’s collection of short stories plumbs veins of dark humor amid the sex and gore his fans have come to expect. The contents range from short shorts - a rumination on “The Fifteen Worst Russian Gay Porn Web Sites” and an abortive episode entitled “One Night in 1979 I Did Too Much Coke and Couldn't Sleep and Had What I Thought Was a Million-Dollar Idea to Write the Definitive Tell-all Book About Glam Rock Based on My Own Personal Experience but This Is as Far as I Got” - to longer pieces in which sadistic male characters explore their preoccupations with the murder, mutilation and rape of nihilistic teenaged boys. Stories of the latter group often feature text pared down to dialogue alone or resembling scripts complete with stage directions. The lighter fare, such as it is, provides much needed comic relief, as in the case of “The Anal-Retentive Line Editor,” which proceeds through interstitial edits upon a series of drafts of a piece of gay erotica, forming a running conversation and problematic seduction between author and editor. This is classic Cooper: explicit, unconventional and, to the uninitiated, alarming. (pp 272), paper, 15,95 |
DANIEL ALLEN COXSHUCK Shuck is the intense, dazzling diary of Jaeven Marshall, a quasi-homeless hustler who seeks his fame and fortune in New York, where he tries to manage his reputation as the city’s porn star du jour when he’s not dumpster diving, tweaking, or trying to get published. As his dreams of becoming a literary star grow dim, and when his love affair with a moody painter becomes hopelessly messy, he tries to reconfigure his life by documenting obsessive lists from found trash, and by hustling, which steals little pieces of his body and scatters them all over the city. Shuck is a remarkable peep show of a novel about what binds artists and prostitutes, and the collateral damage that happens when they try to recover what they have lost. (pp 152), paper, 16,95 |
JAMES DAVIDSONTHE GREEKS & GREEK LOVE: A BOLD NEW EXPLORATION OF THE ANCIENT WORLD From Achilles to Socrates, the Army of Lovers and Alexander the Great, Ancient Greek civilization is full of famous same-sex lovers. Indeed this “Greek Love” is to be found throughout its philosophy and religion, its poetry and painting, its politics and war. For all those who came after them - Ancient Romans, Christians, secular moderns - this inescapable feature of Greek civilization has caused amusement, puzzlement and concern. Were the Greeks simply more relaxed about sex? Or did they have a quite different kind of sexuality altogether? James Davidson asks us to forget everything we thought we knew about the intimate culture of the Greeks and start again from scratch. The result is an engrossing book ranging from the concept of grace to bizarre Spartan sex-acts, from Brazilian tribes to Aryans and Anti-Semites. It also takes a close look at myths, recently discovered paintings and fragments of broken text to produce an infinitely richer and more diverse picture of Greek Love, throwing new light on Greek civilization as a whole and raising fundamental questions about the power of culture, human sexuality and the nature of truth. (pp 789), hard cover, 44,95 |
JEFFREY ESCOFFIERBIGGER THAN LIFE. THE HISTORY OF GAY PORN CINEMA FROM BEEFCAKE TO HARDCORE Hardcore porn - both the straight and gay varieties - entered mainstream American culture in the 1970s as the sexual revolution swept away many of the cultural inhibitions and legal restraints on explicit sexual expression. The first porn movie ever to be reviewed by Variety, the entertainment industry’s leading trade journal, was Wakefield Poole’s Boys in the Sand (1971), a sexually-explicit gay movie shot on Fire Island with a budget of $4000. Moviegoers, celebrities and critics - both gay and straight - flocked to see Boys in the Sand when it opened in mainstream movie theaters in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Within a year, Deep Throat, a heterosexual hardcore feature opened to rave reviews and a huge box office - exceeding that of many mainstream Hollywood features. Almost all of those involved in making “commercial” gay pornographic movies began as amateurs in a field that had virtually never existed before, either as art or commerce. Many of their “underground” predecessors had repeatedly suffered arrest and other forms of legal harassment. There was no developed gay market and any films made commercially were shown in adult x-rated theaters. After the Stonewall riots and the emergence of the gay liberation movement in 1969, a number of entrepreneurs began to make gay adult movies for the new mail order market. The gay porn film industry grew dramatically during the next thirty years and transformed the way men - gay men in particular - conceived of masculinity and their sexuality. Bigger Than Life tells that story. (pp 367), hard cover, 27,50 |
THE FORSTER-CAVAFY LETTERS: FRIENDS AT A SLIGHT ANGLEThe English novelist E.M.Forster and the Greek Alexandrian poet C.P. Cavafy met when Forster was working for the Red Cross in Alexandria during the First World War. Their subsequent correspondence bears witness to a complex relationship and serves as a fascinating testament to Forster’s relentless determination to promote Cavafy by bringing out an English translation of his work. The letters also chronicle Cavafy’s calculated refusal to comply fully with Forster’s plans. The story they tell involves a number of major twentieth century literary personalities. Arnold Toynbee, T.S. Eliot, T.E. Lawrence, and Leonard Woolf all participated in Forster’s early translation project. Forster ultimately succeeded in launching Cavafy’s reputation in the English-speaking world, setting an important precedent for his present global literary fame. Included are all extant letters, the earliest Cavafy translations by George Valassopoulo (incorporating Cavafy’s own authorial emendations), poems by E.M. Forster, archival photographs, and related letters. Edited by Peter Jeffreys. (pp 191), hard cover, 34,95 |
RIGOBERTO GONZALEZTHE MARIPOSA CLUB As they embark on their final year of high school, the Fierce Foursome - Maui, Trini, Isaac, and Liberace - decide to do something big, something that will memorialize their friendships for when they all go their separate ways and begin their new “adult” lives. Having endured the hardships that come with being gay in high school (not to mention in their homes), the boys can’t begin to imagine what they will be faced with when they set out to create Caliente Valley High School’s first GLBTQ organization, the Mariposa Club. All four boys are remarkably different, and they have been brought together for the time being by their shared feelings of being on the periphery at school, at home, and in the community. But once their Club is formed, they will not only have a place where they belong and that is all their own, but it will be a place for future students who feel as displaced as they do. Little do they know that when the town is rocked by a tragic homophobic incident, the high school and entire community will turn to the Mariposa Club as a symbol of their grief, fear and hope. (pp 216), paper, 16,95 |
GREG HERRENMURDER IN THE GARDEN DISTRICT Behind the beautiful facade of a garden district mansion, a powerful political family’s secrets end in murder. A leading candidate for the upcoming senatorial race and a scion of the Louisiana political dynasty is shot to death. The prime suspect is his much younger second wife with a checkered past. Detective Chanse MacLeod enters a world where nothing is as it seems, and uncovers the dark secrets of the state’s first family - secrets someone is willing to kill to keep. With another major hurricane heading towards the Katrina-ravaged city of New Orleans, it’s up to Chanse MacLeod to dig into decades of murders and cover-ups to find the truth before more lives are ruined... including his own and those close to him. (pp 256), paper, 16,95 |
CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOODA SINGLE MAN The author’s favorite of his own novels, now back in print! When A Single Man was originally published, it shocked many by its frank, sympathetic, and moving portrayal of a gay man in midlife. George, the protagonist, is adjusting to life on his own after the sudden death of his partner, and determines to persist in the routines of his daily life; the course of A Single Man spans twenty-four hours in an ordinary day. An Englishman and a professor living in suburban Southern California, he is an outsider in every way, and his internal reflections and interactions with others reveal a man who loves being alive despite everyday injustices and loneliness. Wry, suddenly manic, constantly funny, surprisingly sad, this novel catches the texture of life itself. “Just as his Prater Violet is the best novel I know about the movies, Isherwood’s A Single Man, published in 1964, is one of the first and best novels of the modern gay liberation movement.” - Edmund White. Now a major motion picture starring Colin Firth and Julianne Moore. (pp 186), paper, 16,95 |
TAHAR BEN JELLOUNLEAVING TANGIER The desperate yearning of young Moroccans for the excitement and promise of Spain is captured exquisitely by Tahar Ben Jelloun’s delicate wistful prose. Azel is a young man in Tangier who dreams of crossing the Strait of Gibraltar. He is lucky enough to get his wish, and is spirited off to be the lover of Miguel, a wealthy Spanish man. Azel moves with him to Barcelona, only to discover it’s not all he bargained for. Eventually his sister Kenza joins them. What Azel and Kenza find in Barcelona forms the heart of this novel of seduction and betrayal, deception and disillusionment, in which they are reminded powerfully not only of where they’ve come from, but also of who they really are. (pp 278), paper, 16,95 |
JOSÉ LUIS DE JUANTHIS BREATHING WORLD Two stories placed in front of each other like mirrors. The first is set in first-century Rome and relates the rise and fall of Mazuf, a homosexual Syrian scribe who becomes a renowned man of letters and a murderer. The second is a confession by a present-day American named Laurence; it seems to be simply a record of his sexual exploits during his student days at Harvard, but we soon find out there is much more to his tale than first appears. Laurence, a disaffected and sophisticated narrator, is a murderer too. But what is the connection between the two men? Is the key an old copy of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? And can stories change, not only the future, but more compellingly, the past? In a playfully unsettling and wonderfully sensual novel, prize-winning author José Luis de Juan explores a secret history of desire and the dark desire to make history. (pp 232), paper, 13,95 |
FRANCIS KINGAN AIR THAT KILLS Mark Langworthy has just returned home after a stint as a colonial administrator in India. Once a promising writer, his dreams and idealism have been extinguished, and he returns stricken with malaria and fatigued in both body and spirit. When he meets his nephew, Paul, and ingenuous orphan of eighteen and an aspiring writer, Mark sees in the boy a change for redemption. Over the course of an English summer they form a close though sometimes difficult friendship, but when Paul begins a love affair with one of his uncle’s former acquaintances, Anne, things begin to unravel. A series of circumstances threatens the bond they have developed, and when Anne suggests that Mark’s interest in Paul may not be what it seems, both Mark and Paul will have to come to terms with their feelings and discover the true nature of love and friendship. Published in 1948, An Air That Kills is the third of Francis King’s more than thirty novels. He displays in this early work all the imaginative energy and ardour of a young writer dealing with a theme which he clearly felt profoundly. This 60th anniversary edition includes a new introduction by the author. (pp XII + 200), paper, 18,95 |
TERENCE KISSACKFREE COMRADES: ANARCHISM AND HOMOSEXUALITY IN THE UNITED STATES, 1895-1917 By investigating public records, journals, and books published between 1895 and 1917, Terence Kissack expands the scope of the history of LGBT politics in the United States. The anarchists Kissack examines - such as Emma Goldman, Benjamin Tucker, and Alxander Berkman - defended the right of individuals to pursue same-sex relations, often challenging the conservative beliefs of their fellow anarchists, as well as those outside the movement - police, clergy, and medical authorities - who condemned LGBT people. In his book, Kissack examines the trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde, the life and work of Walt Whitman, periodicals including Tucker’s Liberty and Leonard Abbott’s The Free Comrade, and the frank treatment of homosexual relations in Berkman’s Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist. By defending the right to enter into same-sex partnerships free from social and governmental restaints, the anarchists posed a challenge to society still not met today. (pp 246), paper, 19,95 |
RICHARD LABONTÉ (Ed.)BEST GAY ROMANCE 2010 Best Gay Romance 2010 covers every romantic possibility with first love, true love, wake-up sex, makeup sex and everything in between. Richard Labonté has gathered a sensational collection of stories about finding love at home, at work, at any age, and often in the most unexpected places. David Holly’s “meet cute” hook-up in “Guy Sydney,” is a thoroughly modern love story, while Elazarus Wills’s dramatic “A Companion for the Road” shows that many things get better with age. Trebor Healy’s New Orleans star-crossed lovers in “Trunk” encounter voodoo, hoodoo, and an unexpectedly sweet surprise. Each story is redolent with romance, great sex, and characters who are fully fleshed out in more ways than one. Sometimes rowdy, always randy, and surprisingly tender, these tales celebrate the coming together of souls as well as bodies. Whether happily ever after or just a happy ending, Labonté continues to raise the bar on gay love stories. (pp 214), paper, 16,95 |
DALE PECKSPROUT When Sprout and his father move from Long Island to the midst of rural Kansas after the death of his mother, he is sure he will find no friends, no love, no beauty. But friends find him, the strangeness of the landscape fascinates him, and when love shows up in an unexpected place, Sprout realises that Kansas is not quite as empty as he thought it was going to be. An incredible, literary story of a boy who knows he is gay in a town that seems to have no place for him to hide. Sprout comes from a long tradition of American writing about alienated teenagers (obvious ancestors are Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caulfield) to which it is a highly readable addition. (pp 278), paper, 12,50 |
FREDERICK ROLFE (BARON CORVO)HUBERT’S ARTHUR Taking as its point of departure the alleged inaccuracy of the chronicles of Matthew Paris, Hubert’s Arthur presents an alternative retelling of English history from the point of view of Hubert de Burgh. In Hubert’s narrative, which begins with an account of the struggle for succession in the wake of King Richard Lionheart’s death, young Duke Arthur of Brittany does not die at the hands of King John, but instead ascends to the throne. Hubert relates Arthur’s adventures as he combats the wily John, fights in the Crusades, and wages battle against the treacherous Simon de Montfort, before facing perhaps his greatest challenge when his reign is threatened by the crucifixions of young Christian boys. Penned by the brilliant but eccentric Frederick Rolfe (who styled himself Baron Corvo) whilst he was starving and homeless in a self-imposed exile in Venice, Hubert’s Arthur, first published posthumously in 1935, is one of the strangest and most remarkable novels of the twentieth century. Filled with action and suffused throughout with Rolfe’s characteristic humor, the novel is notable for its blatant homoeroticism and its shockingly graphic violence. This edition features a new scholarly introduction by Kristin Mahoney, who also provides detailed annotations to help guide readers through Rolfe’s labyrinth of historical and literary references and his unique vocabulary of archaic words. Mahoney’s introduction is excellent advocacy for the virtues and importance of Hubert’s Arthur. With notes in the text up to this standard, this edition contributes importantly to scholarship on Rolfe, and also helps forge new understanding of the values of his age. (pp XXXVI + 512), paper, 29,95 |
FREDERICK ROLFE (BARON CORVO)STORIES TOTO TOLD ME Frederick Rolfe, who early in his career also published under the name “Baron Corvo,” became famous for his Hadrian the Seventh (1904), in which an Englishman is unexpectedly elected Pope, and later became infamous for his writings on his love for Venetian boys. But is was with the “Toto” stories, first published in John Lane’s fin de siècle journal The Yellow Book, that Corvo achieved his earliest and most widespread authorial success. In these tales, an Italian peasant youth ingenously recounts to his English master six poignant and often funny stories dealing with Heaven, saints, morality, and religion. First published in volume form in 1898 and long out of print, Stories Toto Told Me remains one of the most remarkable achievements of one of the strangest and most brilliant of English writers. This edition includes a new introduction and extensive annotations by Edmund Miller. (pp XVI + 108), paper, 15,95 |
LEE ROWANTANGLED WEB 1816, Regency London. Brendan Townsend is a young man who is very loyal to his friends. When Tony - his best friend, occasional lover, and a complete screw-up - comes to him in trouble, Brendan is determined to help. Tony is being blackmailed by the owner of a “molly house,” the private club that Tony - and other like-minded gentlemen - frequent in order to indulge their entertainment needs. Brendan is disappointed in his friend’s inability to deal with the situation privately, but agrees to seek the help of his older brother’s military commander. Philip Carlisle is a gentleman to Society, and also a man Brendan’s brother trusted completely and told his younger brother to seek out if he ever was in trouble. Philip is a 40-year-old widower, and finds himself charmed by the attractive young man. Brendan is likewise besotted with hero-worship, especially when Philip turns the tables on the blackmailer and saves the day for many of Society’s closeted sons. What follows is a tale of desire, regrets, cross-country pursuit, hidden identities, lovers torn asunder then reunited, clever cover stories, and the requisite pistols at dawn. (pp 256), paper, 15,95 |
SHEILA ROWBOTHAMEDWARD CARPENTER: A LIFE OF LIBERTY AND LOVE Challenging both capitalism and the values of Western civilization, the gay socialist writer Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) had an extraordinary impact on the cultural and political landscape of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A mystic advocate of, among other causes, free love, recycling, nudism, women’s suffrage and prison reform, Carpenter’s work anticipated the sexual revolution of the 1960s and placed him at the epicentre of the literary culture of his day. Meticulously researched and beautifully written, this major new biography situates Carpenter’s life and thought in relation to the social, aesthetic and intellectual movements of the age, and his friendships with many of its most prominent cultural figures, from writers such as Walt Whitman, Robert Graves, Oscar Wilde and E.M. Forster, to bohemian women including Isadora Duncan and Emma Goldman. Sheila Rowbotham paints a compelling portrait of a man described by contemporaries as a “weathervane” for his times. (pp 565), paper, 26,95 |
P.E. RYANIN MIKE WE TRUST Fifteen-year-old Garth Rudd, more comfortable with his homosexuality than his 5' 2" stature, is grieving his father’s recent death. Forced to get a job, his understandably overprotective mother has asked him to temporarily keep his sexual orientation secret. When his father’s estranged twin appears for a summer visit, Garth’s trust is easily gained. Secretly Mike helps him navigate the unfamiliar waters of gay relationships by taking him to bookstores and facilitating dates with Adam, a school friend. Before long, Mike exploits Garth’s trust and encourages him to quit his job, lie to his mother, and secretly help him collect money for “charities” instead. Soon the scams become apparent and the teen realizes the truth about his uncle. Now the teen must face his friends and his mother. The author has created a story with a pace that does not falter and a resolution that is realistically achieved. Garth is an appealing character, filled with contradictions, vulnerable while seeking strength, honest with himself but surprised at how easily he is able to lie to others. The author’s use of language, at times brilliantly translucent, provides insightful dialogue. This contemporary coming-of-age story set in Richmond, Virginia, subtly and clearly provides a fresh perspective on teenage sexual identity by imbedding it into the context of the bigger issue of truth. (pp 321), hard cover, 19,95 |
MAX SCHAEFERCHILDREN OF THE SUN 1970: Fourteen-year-old Tony becomes seduced by the skinhead movement, sucked into a world of brutal racist violence and bizarre ritual. It’s a milieu in which he must hide his homosexuality, in which every encounter is potentially explosively risky. 2003: James is a young TV researcher, living with his boyfriend. At a loose end, he begins to research the far right in Britain, and its secret gay membership. He becomes particularly fascinated by Nicky Crane, the leader of the movement who came out as gay before dying of AIDS in 1993. The two narrative threads of this extraordinarily assured and ambitious first novel follow Tony through the seventies, eighties and nineties, as the skinhead movement splinters and weakens, and James through a year in which he becomes dangerously immersed in his research. James starts to make contact with individuals on far right websites. He starts receiving threatening phone calls. And then the lives of these two very different heroes unforgettably intersect. Children of the Sun is a work of great imaginative sympathy and range - a novel of unblinking honesty but also of deep feeling, which illuminates the surprisingly thin line that separates aggression from tenderness, and that gives us a picture of a Britain that is strange and yet utterly convincing. (pp 392), paper, 19,95 |
CRAIG SEYMOURALL I COULD BARE: MY LIFE IN THE STRIP CLUBS OF GAY WASHINGTON, D.C. All I Could Bare is the story of a mild-mannered graduate student who “took the road less clothed” - a decision that was life changing. Seymour embarked on his journey in the 1990s, when Washington, D.C.’s gay club scene was notoriously no-holds-barred, all the while trying to keep his newfound vocation a secret from his parents and maintain a relationship with his boyfriend, Seth. Along the way he met some unforgettable characters - the fifty-year-old divorcé who’s obsessed with a twenty-one-year-old dancer, the celebrated drag diva who hailed from a small town in rural Virginia, and the many straight guys who were “gay for pay.” Seymour gives us both the highs (money, adoration, camaraderie) and the lows (an ill-fated attempt at prostitution, a humiliating porn audition). Ultimately coming clean about his secret identity, Seymour breaks through taboos and makes his way from booty-baring stripper to Ph.D.-bearing academic, taking a detour into celebrity journalism and memorably crossing paths with Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey, and Mary J. Blige along the way. Hilarious, insightful, and touching, All I Could Bare proves that sometimes the “wrong decision” can lead to the right place. (pp 243), paper, 16,95 |
RUPERT SMITHMAN’S WORLD London today: a world of sex and drugs and designer clothes, where Robert searches for fulfillment in gay clubs. London fifty years ago: Michael enters a secret queer underworld, negotiating the dangers of the law and the closet, longing for liberation and love. Past and present collide when Robert moves into a new block of flats, and discovers that history is alive and kicking on his doorstep. Man’s World is the story of two gay generations, and a world in which history goes unwritten. Robert’s blog chronicles freedoms that would have been unthinkable fifty years ago - juggling day jobs and nightlife, looking for sex online, taking legality and equality for granted. Michael’s secret diary records the underground pubs, clubs and parties of London’s illegal gay scene, and narrates a love story that could have landed him and his friends in prison. Two worlds that barely recognise each other. But do Robert and Michael have more in common than they think? Man’s World is a funny, sexy and moving story about friendship and desire, about how much the world has changed - and how little. (pp 272), paper, 18,95 |
ABDELLAH TAÏASALVATION ARMY Abdellah Taïa is a brilliant young Moroccan living in France. In this novel, he talks about his first contacts with Europeans. An autobiographical novel by turns naïve and cunning, funny and moving, Salvation Army is a major addition to the new French literature emerging from the North African Arabic diaspora. It is a coming-of-age novel that tells the story of Taïa’s life with complete disclosure - from a childhood bound by family order and latent (homo)sexual tensions in the poor city of Salé, through a sexual awakening in Tangier charged by the young writer’s attraction to his eldest brother, to a disappointing arrival in the Western world to study in Geneva in adulthood. In so doing, Salvation Army manages to burn through the author’s first-person singularity to embody the complex mélange of fear and desire projected by Arabs on Western culture. Recently hailed by his native country’s press as “the first Moroccan to have the courage to publicly assert his difference,” Taïa, through his calmly transgressive work, has “outed” himself as “the only gay man” in a country whose theocratic laws still declares homosexuality a crime. Taïa has a captivating way of taking readers into his confidence and telling essential truths. (pp 144), paper, 17,95 |
MIKEY WALSHGYPSY BOY A classic tale of triumph over adversity, this is the story of one boy’s struggle to escape from a secret world. Mikey was born into a Romany Gypsy family. 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. Growing up, Mickey didn’t go to school, he seldom mixed with non-Gypsies and the caravan became his world. He grew up surrounded by a memorable cast of eccentrics, including his three-foot tall grandmother - a fierce matriarch who didn’t let her diminutive stature get in her way, and his flame-haired mother with a penchant for Dynasty, Angel Delight and electric blue mascara. But his family’s legacy was bittersweet with a hidden history of violence and grief. Eventually Mikey was forced to make an agonising decision - to stay and keep secrets, or escape and find somewhere to belong. The descriptions of the beatings from the hands of his father, and the sexual abuse inflicted on him by his uncle, are heartbreaking. Mikey Walsh paints a vivid picture of a world in which “men are proper men” and for Mikey, an emotional and placid young boy, this was not a world he wished to be part off. Still only very young, Mikey left the gypsy world and set out to make a new life for himself, in a world in which both he and his sexuality would be accepted. And despite being subjected to such terrible cruelty in his early youth, he has managed to come out of his personal struggle as a strong, determined and truly inspirational young man, and a great example to gay men of any background. Gypsy Boy is a moving story, and will invoke pretty strong emotions. (pp 278), paper, 12,95 |
EDWARD PERRY WARRENA DEFENCE OF URANIAN LOVE Edward Perry Warren’s three-volume A Defence of Uranian Love, written under his pseudonym Arthur Lyon Raile and privately printed in 1928-1930, can be judiciously labelled “the premier paederastic apologia in the language.” Warren always and rightly called this work his magnum opus: it is the clearest elucidation of the motives that lay behind his acquisition of Graeco-Roman antiquities for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and other prominent collections. Warren’s acquisition practices converted those antiquities into a “paederastic evangel,” as he himself declares, and his Defence is intimately woven into this lifelong, evangelistic mission. “My verses and my prose,” writes Warren, “advocate a morality, but it is not the current morality in certain matters.” This is understatement at its most playful, for Warren’s Defence is a detailed map to a Utopia where “Grecian grandeur” is restored, and the “Christian sublime,” all but banished; where masculine virtues topple the feminine that have mistakenly led to democracy, sexual purity, and feminism; where aristocracy, nobleness, and male supremacy establish a civilisation in which Nietzsche would have found himself at home; and where paederasty, in the form familiar to the ancient Spartans, could and needs must flourish. For, according to Warren, “Love” (in this case, Boy-love) “can revive the old Hellenic day.” It is this revival - this veritable “Renaissance of Paederasty” - that Warren’s elaborate apologia aims to begin, by reminding Western culture of what it has lost or only forgotten: a sacral Boy-love and its accompanying traditions. Edited and with an extensive introduction by Michael Matthew Kaylor. Foreword by William Armstrong Percy III. (pp CXXXII + 336), hard cover, 49,95 |
EDMUND WHITECITY BOY: MY LIFE IN NEW YORK DURING THE 1960S AND ’70S When Edmund White left the Midwest after college he had an opportunity to pursue a Ph.D. at Harvard. Instead, he followed a lover to New York City. Bristling with wit and energy, City Boy chronicles the remarkable life he made for himself in the 1960s and ’70s, in a city ecenomically devastated but incandescent with art and ideas. White arrives in New York broke and unknown, struggling to express himself as a gay man even as he holds out hope of being “cured.” Present at the Stonewall uprising in 1969, White witnesses the start of the gay movement and gradually begins to embrace his identity. And after a first meeting with James Merrill, to whom he nervously reads aloud from his unpublished novel, White encounters icons from Elizabeth Bishop to William Burroughs, Susan Sontag to Jasper Johns. Absorbing and filtering these heady influences, White finds his own unique artistic voice just as the city’s high culture explodes in creativity. Within a decade of his first publication, White writes A Boy’s Own Story, the autobiographical novel that will make him the most celebrated gay writer in the world. Recalling life in a more sordid Manhattan, in an era of transformation, White records his ambitions and desires, remembers lovers and literary heroes, and displays the wit, candor, and generosity that have defined his unique voice over the decades. (pp 298), hard cover, 25,95 |
EDMUND WHITERIMBAUD: THE DOUBLE LIFE OF A REBEL Although White notes that “a biographer of Rimbaud could fill his pages with nothing but his ceaseless comings and goings,” his own account is slim and skillfully blends action and analysis. Arthur Rimbaud swore off poetry at the age of twenty-one, but he had transformed it more radically by that young age than any poet of his time - it could be argued, of any time. His long poem, A Season in Hell, and his collection, Illuminations, are essential to the modern canon. Stigmatized for his tumultuous affair with the married poet Paul Verlaine, he exiled himself from bohemian Paris, and ultimately died from an infection contracted while selling coffee and guns in Ethiopia. He was thirty-seven. Edmund White dares to decipher the elusive themes of sexual taboo that haunt Rimbaud’s works, offering incisive interpretations of the poems and his own artful translations to bring us closer to the mercurial poet. (pp 192), paper, 15,95 |