Showing results for "Literature" in Genre Fiction

"If it were I who were to be always young and the picture to grow old, I would give my soul for it." So says Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde's brilliant creation who sells his soul for youth and beauty.

It's 1946, and the dust of World War Two has just begun to settle. When famous archaeologist Rufus Denby returns to London, his life and reputation are as devastated as the city around him. He's used to the most glamorous of excavations, but can't turn down the offer of a job in rural Sussex. It's a refuge, and the only means left to him of scraping a living. With nothing but his satchel and a mongrel dog he's rescued from a bomb site, he sets out to investigate an ancient church in the sleepy village of Droyton.

In his Locus review of Two Worlds and in Between - the first volume of The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan - Gary K. Wolfe wrote, “...it makes you wish the second volume were here now.” Well, the long wait is over. This second volume completes this ambitious undertaking, collecting the finest of Kiernan’s stories from 2004 to 2012, selected by the author herself. The book includes 25 short stories and one poem, plus the short novel Black Helicopters - more than 200,000 words of fiction, including the World Fantasy Award-winning “The Prayer of 90 Cats”.

Fueled by tomato sandwiches and green milkshakes, and obsessed with cars, Philbet struggles with life and love as a gay boy in rural Georgia. He’s happiest when helping Grandaddy dig potatoes from the vegetable garden that connects their houses. But Philbet’s world is shattered and his resilience shaken by events that crush his innocence and sense of security; expose his misshapen chest skillfully hidden behind shirts Mama makes at home; and convince him that he’s not fit to be loved by Knox, the older boy he idolizes to distraction.

Ein virtuoser Roman über einen Jungen, der in Russland bei einem homosexuellen Paar aufwächst. Mikita wird nach dem Tod seiner Mutter von ihrem Bruder adoptiert, er ist fünf Jahre alt. Mit Slawa und dessen Partner Lew genießt er eine fröhliche Kindheit. Aber mit der Einschulung beginnt das Versteckspiel, das Lügen. Wenn Besuch kommt, müssen Fotos weggeräumt, in Aufsätzen müssen Dinge verschwiegen oder erfunden werden, und Mikita schlagen Vorurteile entgegen. Er verliert seinen Frohsinn, wird wütend, aggressiv, depressiv.

Buying into the dream that education is the road out of poverty, a teen mom takes a chance on bettering herself, gets on welfare rolls, and talks her way into college. But once she's there, phallocratic narratives permeate every subject, and creative writing professors depend heavily on Freytag's pyramid to analyze life. So Ariel turns to a rich subcultural canon of resistance and failure, populated by writers like Audre Lorde, Tillie Olsen, and Kathy Acker. Wryly riffing on feminist literary tropes, We Were Witches documents the survival of a demonized single mother.

Sarah never admits that she’s his mother, but the beautiful boy has watched her survive as a “lot lizard”: a prostitute working the West Virginia truck stops. Desperate to win her love, he decides to surpass her as the best and most famous lot lizard ever.

Brillant avocat de Manhattan, Viggo ne perd jamais une affaire. Une seule chose lui manque pour devenir associé dans son cabinet : la nationalité américaine. North Smith, pompier à New York, est contraint de subvenir aux besoins de la famille de son frère. Rongé par la culpabilité de n'avoir pu sauver son jumeau dans un incendie, il est en effet prêt à aller contre tous ses principes et à se marier en échange d'une somme d'argent qui pourrait tout changer. Ce plan est censé être simple : un mariage factice, aucun sentiment.

Ivory’s life changes irrevocably when she discovers the body of Cabrina Brite on the sands of Cape Morning, along with a mysterious poem. How did she die, and why does it seem she was trying to swim to Ghost Cat Island, the center of so many local mysteries? Desperate to uncover the answers surrounding Cabrina’s death, and haunted by her discovery, Ivory begins to see the pale ghost of Cabrina, only to shake it off as a mere hallucination. But Ivory is not alone.

Hundreds of years ago, on a wild sea coast, two bold-hearted men met in combat and love...This is the story of Caius, a Christian monk struggling to reconcile his sensual nature with his newfound faith, and of Fenrir, a ferocious Viking raider abandoned by his comrades and left for dead. When Caius takes pity on the wounded man, his brethren are horrified: what kind of wolf has Cai brought into the fold?

Gabriele è un ragazzo di trent’anni che ama le piante e che lavora per una ditta di disinfestazioni nonostante sia un architetto. Con sua madre non parla da dieci anni, da quando lui è uscito dai Testimoni, una setta religiosa che dopo la morte del padre, avvenuta quando Gabriele era bambino, è diventata tutta la sua vita. Gabriele ha voluto continuare gli studi, cosa non permessa ai Testimoni, e ha scoperto il suo orientamento sessuale.

Winner of the Whitbread Prize for best first fiction. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a coming-out novel from Winterson, the acclaimed author of The Passion and Sexing the Cherry. The narrator, Jeanette, cuts her teeth on the knowledge that she is one of God’s elect, but as this budding evangelical comes of age and comes to terms with her preference for her own sex, the peculiar balance of her God-fearing household crumbles.

This is the story of two sisters, Mia and Inés. Two girls enveloped in love, trapped by social conventions of Casablanca at the dawn of the 21st century and silenced by the political 'truths' that envelop their lives. Mia - the older sister, a warrior and a pariah, her sexuality a matter of scorn, a truth to be erased. Inés - the little sister, a woman trying to carve out an identity in a Paris that derides and erases her with no way back to Morocco, a homeland her father has warned her never to return to for her own sake.

Life is normal… suspiciously normal. During my long, lonely years as a hitman, I never realized that one day, I would have a family to call my own. Now, instead of stalking my targets and taking down people with a flick of my wrist, my specialties lie in things like planning sleepovers (why does Waylon look terrified?), The Fence hour (those are screams of joy), and involving others to help our child succeed (no, of course I didn’t abduct anyone).

From a youthful infatuation with a cabinet maker in a small Italian fishing village, to a passionate yet sporadic affair with a woman in New York, to an obsession with a man he meets at a tennis court, Enigma Variations charts one man's path through the great loves of his life. André Aciman casts a shimmering light over each facet of desire, to probe how we ache, want, and waver, and ultimately how we sometimes falter and let go of the very ones we want the most.

Moving from a Midwestern college to the Stonewall Tavern on the night of the first gay uprising - and populated by eloquent queens, butch poseurs, and a fearfully incompetent shrink - The Beautiful Room is Empty conflates the acts of coming out and coming of age.

Raised in a conservative Christian home in the East Coast of Canada, Mag is urged to preserve her purity at all costs. Desperate to secure her place in heaven, she rejects the hyper-sexual youth culture of her small town—until she falls for a magnetic, sophisticated girl while attending a program designed to usher young people into Evangelical Missionary work. Spiraling into shame and regret, Mag breaks away from the Church and launches herself into the world of sex for hire, attempting to shed her repressive past and become an anti-virgin—the antithesis of who she was raised to be.

Eine Geschichte über die Liebe zweier Frauen, die gegen alle Widerstände um ihr Glück kämpfen. Annie Weaver, Ex-CIA-Agentin, will nur eins: Vergessen. An der Uni findet sie unerwartet Anschluss und fühlt sich zu ihrer Professorin, Helen Everton, hingezogen. Zu ihrer eigenen Überraschung findet Annie in Helen und ihren Kindern die Geborgenheit einer Familie, die sie in ihrem turbulenten Leben nie erfahren durfte. Doch die Idylle trügt. Helens scharfer Verstand bringt sie der Wahrheit über Annies Vergangenheit gefährlich nahe, während die CIA droht, Annies neues Leben zu zerstören.

Fascinado pela figura de uma drag queen chamada Madame Xanadu, o jornalista João resolve investigar a história dela. Para isso, busca a ajuda das pessoas que conviveram com a Madame mesmo antes de ela se tornar uma das personagens mais marcantes da cidade de Natal. Enquanto acompanhamos a investigação de João, consumida por uma melancolia inexplicável, Madame segue o plano de acabar com a própria vida.

When Paul enters university in early 1970s Pittsburgh, it’s with the hope of moving past the recent death of his father. Sensitive, insecure and like a stranger to his family, Paul feels isolated and alone. When he meets the worldly Julian in his freshman ethics class, Paul is immediately drawn to his classmate’s effortless charm. Paul will stop at nothing to prove himself worthy of their friendship. But Julian is as volatile and cruel as he is charismatic, and Paul begins to suspect that he can never live up to what Julian expects of him.