Showing results for "Brilliance" in LGBTQ+

For Audrey Lind, working with clay still evokes memories of her favorite professor. The woman’s zeal for art history ignited Audrey’s own academic career—and her tweed blazers and British accent kindled her first female crush. After fate brings Audrey back to Northshire University to teach, she’s thrilled to be working alongside her former mentor, but the grumpy woman she encounters upon her return is nothing like the dynamo she remembers.

Books are Rosie Taft’s life. And ever since she took over her mother’s beloved Manhattan bookstore, they’ve become her home too. The only thing missing is her own real-life romance like the ones she loves to read about, and Rosie has an idea of who she might like to sweep her off her feet. She’s struck up a flirty online friendship with lesbian romance author Brie, and what could be more romantic than falling in love with her favorite author?

Two young women. Heirs to altogether different hereditary burdens. Yet bound by a monstrous threat to their village. Gabrielle is the first woman in Alveus to carry the mantle of Hunter, which comes with an obligation to kill the faery beasts murdering travelers in Brimmond Wood. Wary of the power she wields as guardian of her people, Gabrielle is summoned by her first love, a seductress who shattered her heart into pieces a decade ago.

Dr. Laurel Harlow can’t believe she’s agreed to do a reality TV show. But her years as a chemical dependency counselor and personal history with the show’s director make her the obvious choice. Treating a mansion full of former child stars on the road to recovery is the tallest order of her career—especially when one of them turns up dead while the cameras are still rolling.

After narrowly escaping with their lives, three lovers board the Kraken once more, determined to uncover who tried to kidnap them—and why. Reveling in each other’s tangled embrace, water nymph Naia, god of love Aleksi, and pirate lord Einar sail back to the kingdom of ice. But the enemy they seek hides deep within the queen’s court. And the traitor’s trail of deception leads to a danger unlike anything they’ve ever encountered.

Michelle, a queer, wannabe writer exasperated by student loans, bad teeth, and the poor decisions of her loveable sitcom-worthy family, believes a sugar daddy is written in her destiny as firmly as she believes her idol, Alanis Morissette, holds the musical blueprint to the life she desires most. With a salt-of-the-earth Chicano father who's convinced aliens will eventually rule the world, a white mother who maxes out her credit cards on fast food, and a sugar-hyped 7-year-old nephew, Michelle diagnoses herself as self-parentified with a core mistrust in the world’s unreliability.

Eden Sands has been a star for twenty years, but it’s lonely at the top. Her mediocre marriage just ended, and her inner circle is smaller than ever. The stage is the only place she’s ever felt like she truly belonged, and yet, her last album flopped, and her upcoming tour hasn’t sold out. Eden’s desperate for her star to shine bright again, but when her team suggests a collaboration with an up-and-coming young star to give her a boost, she balks.

Adam Murphy wants to be a serious journalist. Unfortunately, he spends his days writing copy about underwear and abs for a gay lifestyle magazine. When a troubled young porn star brings him a tip about a recently deceased marine's secret visit to an infamous pimp for underage boys, Adam is determined to break the story... until someone starts threatening his life.

London, 1958. By crafting magical outfits for his friend, Princess Katherine, cloth mage Paul Gallagher is getting ahead. It’s not a seamless path. Not since the Virtuis Party came to power. The far-right faction is using criminals to create a protective barrier around England. The enchanted uniforms the prisoners wear may beget a demand for mages, but using luckless convicts as tools for warmongering reactionaries isn’t Paul’s dream for cloth magic.

Sparkle McCavity, young drag queen and employee of Miss Merkin, is missing, presumed kidnapped or even worse. Naturally, Merkin turns to reluctant sleuth and friend to the community Fi for help, but clues and suspects are worryingly thin on the ground—and the drag king Stan the Man is proving somewhat distracting. When Merkin’s niece is then found murdered, spiked on a light pole in nightclub TRASH, it becomes clear that Fi’s friends are in danger. Again.

It is more than just the late November weather that has cast a chill over the campus of Atherton University. When the wife of respected professor Eric Eberman is killed in a tragic accident, his secret student lover, Randall Stone, fears the professor tried to avert career suicide by committing homicide. Or do the dead woman’s haunting last words point to an even more damning crime? Fearing the truth, Randall digs into his lover’s hidden history.

Vagablonde is a darkly humorous, rollercoaster ride through the Los Angeles music scene about a woman who wants two things, the first is to live without psychotropic medication, and the second is to experience success as an artist. A cautionary tale about viral fame, Vagablonde speaks directly to our time in biting detail.

Delightfully cheeky, unquestionably charming, and sometimes maddeningly naive, cloth mage Paul Gallagher is desperately trying to make a name for himself in a reimagined postwar London. But in a world where magic is commonplace, sewing enchanted clothes is seen as little more than a frivolous distraction. Paul is hiding a secret, however: he possesses a powerful - and illegal - innate magic. Unfortunately, Paul confides in the wrong person - his latest crush, Captain Hector Hollister - and is drawn into a sinister plot that risks reigniting the machinery of war.

Closeted teenager Jeremy is sent to live with wealthy relatives after his mother enters rehab. Struggling to fit into the posh world of Ballena Beach, Jeremy joins the high school swim team, dates a popular girl, and begins to think he may have landed in paradise - until his great aunt Katharine starts to dictate his every move…and a late-night phone call insinuates that his father’s accidental death was not so accidental after all. As Jeremy grows accustomed to the veneer of a fabulous life, so grows his need for answers - as well as the danger of immeasurable harm.

Four high school students in present-day New Orleans are torn apart by envy, passion, and tragedy. Meredith, Brandon, Greg, and Stephen quickly discover the fragile boundaries between friendship and betrayal as they enter high school and form new alliances. Then two violent deaths disrupt the core of what they once shared.

What’s a sweets-loving young boy growing up gay in North Carolina in the '80s supposed to think when he’s diagnosed with type-1 diabetes? That God is punishing him, naturally. This was, after all, when gay-hating Jesse Helms was his senator, AIDS was still the boogeyman, and no one was saying, "It gets better." And if stealing a copy of a gay porno magazine from the newsagent was a sin, then surely what the men inside were doing to one another was much worse. Sweet Tooth is Tim Anderson’s uproarious memoir of life after his hormones and blood sugar both went berserk.

James Ramsay is twenty-one years old and he has just inherited a building in New York City. After the death of his estranged mother, he finds that he is now the owner of No. 1 Dutch Street - a five-story brownstone near the World Trade Center. As James takes up residence there, trying to figure out his next move, he gets to know the only other tenant: an elderly black woman named Nellydean. Under a mounting tide of taxes, James finds himself faced with a stark choice.

The art world falls in love with Dixie Stammers when it is discovered that not only are her pots mechanically perfect spheres, they are also identical, despite the fact that they are made entirely by hand, without benefit of a wheel, measuring device, or any other tool. Her teenage son, Judas, is pathologically shy, and retreats into a world of anonymous sexual encounters at a roadside rest area. What he really longs for though is a relationship with one of the boys at the private school he attends.

Brian Belovitch has the rare distinction of coming out three times: first as a queer teenager; second as a glamorous transgender woman named Tish, and later, Natalia Gervais; and finally as an HIV-positive gay man surviving the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. From growing up in a barely-working-class first-generation immigrant family in Fall River, Massachusetts, to spinning across the disco dance floor of Studio 54 in New York City, Brian escaped many near-death experiences. Trans Figured chronicles a life lived on the edge with an unforgettable cast of characters.

Do you know me?, the email began, sparking tremors of fear that turned into a full quake of panic when William Dameron discovered that his selfie had been stolen by strangers. On social networks and dating sites, his image and identity - a forty-year-old straight white male - had been used to hook countless women into believing in lies of love and romance.