Showing titles in Coming of Age

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. 

When Ahmed's parents send him to a residential treatment center known as Serenity Ridge, it's with one goal: to "fix" their son, at any cost. But eleven months of abuse and overmedication leave him desperate to escape. And when the opportunity comes, Ahmed runs away to San Francisco. There, he moves into a secret safe house shared by a group of teens. Until they become independent at eighteen, the housemates hide away from authorities, bound by rules that both protect and frustrate.

This is not a hair book. It's a dark comedy of a spiritual misfit, a child with a dream born into the wrong town. Religious cults, corporate cults, and insane clients - Francis can't catch a break. Francis has observed his own inability to fit in since birth, and his decision to be a professional cosmetologist only exacerbates his innate oddness.

After four years of living with relatives in Switzerland, 17-year-old Joel Scherzenlieb finds himself in the United States for the summer, working at a Boy Scout camp. There, he meets 19-year-old Corey Cobbett, a fellow counselor and the only person Joel wants to be friends with. Soon, Joel's sarcastic, distant CIA father shows up and whisks him away to live with his mother, grandmother, and older sister on a farm in Virginia - he's not going back to Switzerland after all.

It’s 1980 in New York City, and nowhere is the city’s glamour and energy better reflected than in the burgeoning Harlem ballroom scene, where 17-year-old Angel first comes into her own. Burned by her traumatic past, Angel is new to the drag world and has a yearning to help create a family for those without. When she falls in love with Hector, a beautiful young man who dreams of becoming a professional dancer, the two decide to form the House of Xtravaganza, the first-ever all-Latino house in the ballroom circuit.

A story at once mythic and strikingly timely, Sarah Moss's Ghost Wall urges us to wonder how far we have come from the 'primitive minds' of our ancestors. Teenage Silvie is living in a remote Northumberland camp as an exercise in experimental archaeology. Her father is an abusive man, obsessed with recreating the discomfort, brutality and harshness of Iron Age life. Behind and ahead of Silvie's narrative is the story of a bog girl, a sacrifice, a woman killed by those closest to her, and as the hot summer builds to a terrifying climax, Silvie and the Bog girl are in ever more terrifying proximity.

In 1988, before her senior year of high school, Nina and her best friend spend the summer alone on Cape Cod. Nina has grown up with her ailing grandmother - and she yearns for the chance of a deeper connection. When she enrolls in an acting course, she soon finds romance with Sarah, one of the teaching assistants. Nina's own world revolves around Sarah, while the rest of the world moves urgently on. Nina's high school teacher does not take the end of their relationship well; her best friend feels abandoned; the AIDS epidemic rages; her fellow actors grow and hone their talents.

From syndicated humor columnist Marc Acito comes a wildly inventive and hysterically funny novel that is equal parts Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Fame, Risky Business, Dead Poets Society, and The Catcher in the Rye.

Sydney Skate considers himself shockproof. For as long as he can remember, he's known that his fashionable Manhattan mother is secretly a lesbian, although he's never let on that he knows. He spends his summer days caring for snakes at the local pet shop before leaving for college at Cornell, shrugging off his father's demands that he skip college and join the exciting world of swimming pool sales for suburbanites.

In Metes and Bounds, surf, sand, and sex meet in the macho world of construction workers. For narrator Matt, "the greatest comfort of surfing comes in the sureness and instinct." Matt is not just coming of age, he's coming out, and in the sun-bleached world of the North Carolina beaches his burgeoning sexuality can toss as many curves as a wave. Through his longings and self-discovery, Matt knows he cannot let others triumph over being the man he knows to be.

In 2000, Douglas A. Martin burst onto the American literary scene with his sexy debut novel, Outline of My Lover. Following up with three more books, including Branwell, a novel of the Bront brother, Martin has established himself as an acclaimed and distinctive American writer of the new century. His semi-autobiographical novel Once You Go Back is about growing up in a strained working-class household transplanted to the South.

The is a novel about a boy growing up with a closeted gay father. It details the good times and the bad times of living with a parent who never wanted to live up to who and what he was.

Daron Marks is a young guitar player with a dream: to make it big like the guys he grew up idolizing in New Jersey - or at least escape his dysfunctional family. He makes it as far as music school in Rhode Island and the rock clubs of Boston beckon him. But it's hard to succeed from the closet.

"Chiamami col tuo nome" è il racconto dell'attrazione improvvisa e travolgente che sboccia tra due ragazzi, il diciassettenne Elio, figlio di un professore universitario, in vacanza con la famiglia nella loro villa in Riviera e un giovane ospite, invitato per l'estate, il ventiquattrenne Oliver...

Love, sex, death, family, friendship, betrayal, tenderness, brutality, sacrifice and revelation. This incendiary collection of stories from acclaimed writer Christos Tsiolkas, best-selling author of The Slap and Barracuda, takes you deep into worlds both strange and familiar, and introduces you to characters who will never let you go and situations that will haunt you forever.

Written in an urban vernacular that’s electrifying and intimate, On the Come Up introduces a heroine whose voice is irrepressible, dynamic, and unstintingly honest. Thirteen-year-old AnnMarie Walker dreams of a world beyond Far Rockaway, where the sway of the neighborhood keeps her tied to old ideas about success. While attending a school for pregnant teens, AnnMarie comes across a flyer advertising movie auditions in Manhattan. Astonishingly, improbably, and four months before she’s due to give birth - she lands a lead role.

"Lieber Gott und Jesus, Verzeihung! Bitte macht, dass ich nicht so bin, und bitte macht, dass das vorbeigeht." Aus den Befürchtungen wird für den 13-jährigen Yngve schnell eine Sehnsucht nach mehr, nachdem er mit Magnus auf der Turnmatte lag. Es beginnt eine Liebe, die vollkommen zu sein scheint. Vor anderen verborgen treffen sich die beiden heimlich in einem romantischen Waldstück und die Beziehung und Gefühle zueinander wachsen stetig ("Er... kam wie ein Geysir mit Lärm und Getöse").

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. 

Michael Chabon masterfully renders the funny, tender, and captivating first-person narrative of Art Bechstein, whose confusion and heartache echo the tones of literary forebears like The Catcher in the Rye's Holden Caulfield and The Great Gatsby's Nick Carraway. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh incontrovertibly established Chabon as a powerful force in contemporary fiction, even before his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. An unforgettable story of coming of age in America, it is also an essential milestone in American fiction.

The remarkable first novel by a young, gay, black author who fashioned a deeply moving and compelling coming-of-age story out of the controversial issues of bisexuality and AIDS Law school, girlfriends, and career choices were all part of Raymond Tyler's life, but there were other, more...