Gay & Lesbian
Book List Category:
By James Baldwin.
"Set in the 1950s, Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality"--P. [4] of cover.
By Katharine Beutner.
In this vivid reimagining of a classical Greek myth, the eponymous Greek heroine Alcetis, known as the good wife because she loved her husband so much that she died to save his life, tells about her childhood, her marriage to the young king of Pherae, and what happened during the three days she spent in the underworld before being rescued by Heracles. Set in the world of Mycenaean Greece.
By Neil Bartlett.
At 47, Mr F's working life on London's Skin Lane is one governed by calm, precision and routine, so when he starts to have frightening, recurring nightmares, he does his best to ignore them.
By Lucy Jane Bledsoe.
"Antarctica is a vortex that draws you back, season after season... Thirty-year-old Rosie Moore ... flies in for her third season on the Ice. She plans to avoid all entanglements, romantic and otherwise, and do her work as a galley cook. But when her flight crash-lands, so do all her plans. Mikala Wilbo, a brilliant young composer whose heart, and music, have been frozen since the death of her partner, is also on that flight. She has come to the Ice as an artist-in-residence, to write music, but also to secretly check out the astrophysicist father she has never met. Arriving a few weeks later, Alice Neilson, a graduate student in geology who thinks in charts and equations, is thrilled to leave her dependent mother and begin her career at last. But from the start she is aware that her post-doc advisor, with whom she will work in Antarctica, expects much more from their relationship. As the three women become increasingly involved in each other's lives, they find themselves deeply transformed by their time on the Ice..."--p. [2] of jacket.
By Christopher Bram.
Zack Knowles, a psychologist, and Daniel Wexler, an art teacher at a college in Virginia, have been together for twenty-one years. In the fall of 2002, a few months before the Iraq War, a new artist in residence, Abbas Rohani, arrives with his Russian wife, Elena, and their two children. But Abbas is not quite what he seems, and he begins an affair with Daniel. Soon politics intrude upon two families thrown together by love, threatening the future of both in ways no one could have predicted.
By John Boyne.
Tristan Sadler, a gay soldier, recalls his time spent fighting in World War I and the intensity of his friendship with Will Bancroft, a soldier who became a conscientious objector and was shot as a traitor.
By Rita Mae Brown & Sneaky Pie Brown ; illustrations by Michael Gellatly.
Using animal cunning and human canniness, Harry Harristeen and her menagerie of mystery solvers must sniff out the answers behind the disappearance of alumni association board member Mariah D'Angelo. Mariah's car is on campus, and Tucker has found human blood near the school's stables.
By William S. Burroughs ; edited by James Grauerholz and Barry Miles.
Bill Lee, an addict and hustler, travels to Mexico and then Tangier in order to find easy access to drugs, and ends up in the Interzone, a bizarre fantasy world, in a commemorative edition that features restored text, archival material, Burroughs's own later introduction to the book, and his essay on psychoactive drugs.
By Peter Cameron.
Nursing an elderly cancer patient in an isolated English countryside manse in 1950, Coral interacts with a disgruntled housekeeper and her charge's sexually torn and war-ravaged son until a series of random events culminates in a complicated marriage.
By John Cheever.
In a nightmarish prison a convict named Farragut struggles to remain a man. Out of Farragut's suffering and astonishing salvation, Cheever crafted his most powerful work of fiction.
By Michael Cunningham.
Peter and Rebecca Harris--mid-forties denizens of Manhattan's SoHo, he a dealer, she an editor--are admirable, enviable contemporary urbanites with every reason, it seems, to be happy. Then Rebecca's much younger look-alike brother, Ethan (known in the family as Mizzy, "the mistake"), shows up for a visit.
By Stacey D'Erasmo.
An extended family living in San Francisco faces the approaching breakdown of a troubled adolescent boy and the tribulations caused by the difficulties of gay parenthood.
By Emma Donoghue.
Narrator Jack and his mother, who was kidnapped seven years earlier when she was a 19-year-old college student, celebrate his fifth birthday. They live in a tiny, 11-foot-square soundproofed cell in a converted shed in the kidnapper's yard. The sociopath, whom Jack has dubbed Old Nick, visits at night, grudgingly doling out food and supplies. But Ma, as Jack calls her, proves to be resilient and resourceful--and attempts a nail-biting escape.
By Larry Duplechan.
Johnny Ray Rousseau first made an appearance in the 1986 novel Blackbird, back when the protagonist was just a teen fighting with his burgeoning sexuality. Now he's forty-eight, still handsome and gym-built but admittedly vain and looking down the short road to fifty with some chagrin. In the midst of a midlife crisis, he falls for a much younger man.
By Bret Easton Ellis.
Clay, a successful screenwriter, has returned from New York to Los Angeles to help cast his new movie, and he's soon drifting through a long-familiar circle that will leave him no choice but to plumb the darkest recesses of his character and come to terms with his proclivity for betrayal.
By Michael Thomas Ford.
When a car accident leaves forty-year-old Burke Crenshaw in need of temporary full-time care, he finds himself back in the Vermont home where he grew up as be begins the long recuperation. A burgeoning relationship with the twenty-year-old son of Burke's high school best friend draws him out of himself and into the community he left behind. Exploring local history, he discovers an intriguing series of letters from a Civil War soldier to his fiance. With the help of librarian Sam Guffrey, he begins to research a 125-year-old mystery that seems to be reaching into the present day. The more Burke delves into the past, the more he's forced to confront the person he has become: the choices he made and those he avoided, his ideas of what it takes to be a successful gay man, his feelings about his mother's death, and the suppressed tension that simmers between himself and his father.
By Jean Genet ; translated by Bernard Frechtman ; introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre.
A wildly imaginative fantasy of the Parisian underworld, the novel tells the story of Divine, a male prostitute who consorts with thieves, pimps, murderers, and other criminals and who has many sexual adventures. Written in lyrical, dreamlike prose, the novel affirms a new moral order, one in which criminals are saints, evil is glorified, and conventional taboos are freely violated.
By Julia Glass.
In June of 1989 Paul McLeod, a newspaper publisher and recent widower, travels to Greece, where he falls for a young American artist and reflects on the complicated truth about his marriage. Six years later, again in June, Paul's death draws his three grown sons and their families back to their ancestral home. Fenno, the eldest, a wry, introspective gay man, narrates the events of this unforeseen reunion. Far from his straitlaced expatriate life as a bookseller in Greenwich Village, Fenno is stunned by a series of revelations that threaten his carefully crafted defenses. Four years farther on, in yet another June, a chance meeting on the Long Island shore brings Fenno together with Fern Olitsky, the artist who once captivated his father. Now pregnant, Fern must weigh her guilt about the past against her wishes for the future and decide what family means to her. In prose rich with compassion and wit, Three Junes paints a haunting portrait of love's redemptive powers.
By Nicola Griffith.
Shaken by a brutal event involving one of her self-defense students and still grieving her lover Julia's death, lesbian former cop Aud Torvingen travels from Atlanta to Seattle to deal with possible fraud by the real estate manager handling her late father's holdings and finds herself investigating the sabotage of a television pilot and strongly attracted to the set's caterer, former stuntwoman Victoria "Kick" Kuiper.
By by Jim Grimsley.
A blackly comic tale of a bankrupt accounting executive who dreams of achieving stardom in the only way a pathetic failure can -- by murdering his wife.
By Doris Grumbach.
The struggle of four people--two men and two women--to come to terms with their sexuality. The novel picks them up in childhood on the brink of puberty and follows them as they turn to homosexuality, lesbianism, incest and in one case celibacy. By the author of Fifty Days of Solitude.
By Ellen Hart.
Taking a seemingly easy job in her first case as a fledgling private investigator, Jane Lawless attempts to track down the missing father of client Annie Andrews, a successful effort with unanticipated consequences.
By Adam Haslett.
At the heart of this novel lies a test of wills between a young banker, Doug Fanning, and a retired schoolteacher, Charlotte Graves, whose two dogs have begun to speak to her. When Doug builds an ostentatious mansion on land that Charlotte's grandfather donated to the town of Finden, Massachusetts, she determines to oust him in court. As a senior manager of Union Atlantic bank, a major financial conglomerate, Doug is embroiled in the company's struggle to remain afloat. It is Charlotte's brother, Henry Graves, the president of the New York Federal Reserve, who must keep a watchful eye on Union Atlantic and the entire financial system. Drawn into Doug and Charlotte's intensifying conflict is Nate Fuller, a troubled high-school senior who unwittingly stirs powerful emotions in each of them.
By by Andrew Holleran.
The loneliness of an aging homosexual. All his friends have died of aids and at his age one does not make new friends easily. He feels out of the picture, especially as he is of the old school--discreet. Not even his mother knows he is gay.
By Alan Hollinghurst.
In the late summer of 1913, George Sawle brings his Cambridge schoolmate--a handsome, aristocratic young poet named Cecil Valance--to his family's modest home outside London for the weekend. George is enthralled by Cecil, and soon his sixteen-year-old sister, Daphne, is equally besotted by him and the stories he tells about Corley Court, the country estate he is heir to. But what Cecil writes in Daphne's autograph album will change their and their families' lives forever: a poem that, after Cecil is killed in the Great War and his reputation burnished, will become a touchstone for a generation, a work recited by every schoolchild in England. Over time, a tragic love story is spun, even as other secrets lie buried--until, decades later, an ambitious biographer threatens to unearth them.
By Langston Hughes.
For every bustling jazz joint that opened in Korean War–era Harlem, a new church seemed to spring up. Tambourines to Glory introduces you to an unlikely team behind a church whose rock was the curb at 126th and Lenox.
By Christopher Isherwood ; introduction by Armistead Maupin ; preface by Christopher Isherwood.
First published in the 1930s, The Berlin Stories contains two astonishing related novels, The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin, which are recognized today as classics of modern fiction. Isherwood magnificently captures 1931 Berlin: charming, with its avenues and cafés; marvelously grotesque, with its nightlife and dreamers; dangerous, with its vice and intrigue; powerful and seedy, with its mobs and millionaires—this is the period when Hitler was beginning his move to power.
By David Leavitt.
Leavitt's novel centers on the relationship between mathematicians G.H. Hardy (1877-1947) and Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920). In January of 1913, Cambridge-based Hardy receives a nine-page letter filled with prime number theorems from S. Ramanujan, a young accounts clerk in Madras. Intrigued, Hardy consults his colleague and collaborator, J.E. Littlewood; the two soon decide Ramanujan is a mathematical genius and that he should emigrate to Cambridge to work with them. Hardy recruits the young, eager don, Eric Neville, and his wife, Alice, to travel to India and expedite Ramanujan's arrival; Alice's changing affections, WWI and Ramanujan's enigmatic ailments add obstacles. Meanwhile, Hardy, a reclusive scholar and closeted homosexual, narrates a second story line cast as a series of 1936 Harvard lectures, some of them imagined. Ramanujan comes to renown as the the Hindu calculator discussions of mathematics and bits of Cambridge's often risque ̌academic culture (including D.H. Lawrence's 1915 visit) add authenticity.
By Michael Lowenthal.
"Having a baby to save a marriage--it's the oldest of clichés. But what if the marriage at risk is a gay one, and having a baby involves a surrogate mother? Pat Faunce is a faltering romantic, a former poetry major who now writes textbooks. A decade into his relationship with Stu, an airline pilot from a fraught Jewish family, he fears he's losing Stu to other men--and losing himself in their "no rules" arrangement. Yearning for a baby and a deeper commitment, he pressures Stu to move from Manhattan to Cape Cod, to the cottage where Pat spent boyhood summers. As they struggle to adjust to their new life, they enlist a surrogate: Debora, a charismatic Brazilian immigrant, married to Danny, an American home rebuilder. Gradually, Pat and Debora bond, drawn together by the logistics of getting pregnant and away from their spouses. Pat gets caught between loyalties--to Stu and his family, to Debora, to his own potent desires--and wonders: is he fit to be a father? In one of the first novels to explore the experience of gay men seeking a child through surrogacy, Michael Lowenthal writes passionately about marriages and mistakes, loyalty and betrayal, and about how our drive to create families can complicate the ones we already have. The Paternity Test is a provocative look at the new "family values."--Publisher's description.
By Armistead Maupin.
Michael Tolliver, the sweet-spirited Southerner in Armistead Maupin's classic Tales of the City series, lives on in this novel about growing older joyfully. Almost twenty years after ending his saga of San Francisco life, author Maupin revisits his all-too-human hero, letting the 55-year-old gardener tell his own story. Having survived the plague that took so many of his friends and lovers, Michael has learned to embrace the random pleasures of life, the tender alliances that sustain him in the hardest of times. This book follows its protagonist as he finds love with a younger man, attends to his dying fundamentalist mother in Florida, and finally reaffirms his allegiance to a wise octogenarian who was once his landlady. This stand-alone novel is accessible to new readers, while fans of Tales of the City will find a reassuring number of familiar faces.--From publisher description.
By Maria McCann.
Set during the 17th century English revolution, Jacob Cullen flees his wedding to avoid murder charges only to join Cromwell's army where he begins a relationship with Christopher and togther they try and begin a farming colony.
By Stephen McCauley.
Rossi works in HR at a touchy-feely software company and prides himself on his understanding of the foibles and fictions we all use to get through the day. Too bad he's not as good at spotting such behavior in himself.
By Val McDermid.
More than twenty years after the 1984 national miners' strike in Scotland, Cold Case Review Team Inspector Karen Pirie stumbles across new evidence that links the cases of a missing strikebreaker and a kidnapping gone wrong.
By Vestal McIntyre.
Follows a year in the lives of a Cold War-era trailer community in Idaho, where single moms Lina and Connie struggle with their sons' exploits, their economic disadvantages, and the edicts of faith.
By Jennifer McMahon.
Calling themselves the Dismantlers, three daring misfits--Henry, Tess, Winnie, and Suz--spend the summer after graduation in a remote cabin in the Vermont woods committing acts of vandalism and plotting elaborate pranks. But everything changes when one particularly twisted experiment ends in Suz's death and the others decide to cover it up. Ten years later when a victim of their past pranks commits suicide, a chain of eerie events threatens to engulf Henry, Tess, and their inquisitive nine-year-old daughter, Emma.
By Ethan Mordden.
For a generation, Ethan Mordden's tales about a tightly knit circle of friends who live within the shifting confines of gay Manhattan have entertained tens of thousands of readers and devoted fans. Now Mordden returns to his best-loved characters - the ultimate hunk Carlo; the best friend Dennis Savage; J. Cosgrove the maturing elf-child; and narrator and ultimate observer Bud - in this eagerly awaited last volume in the cycle.
By Joseph Olshan.
"Russell Todaro, a young American translator, moves to Paris to take stock of his life and goals only to further lose himself in the surprising twists fate has in store for him. One night, two men waving guns and knives break and enter their Paris hotel room, terrorizing Russell and his much older companion, a famous American poet named Edward Cannon. The intruders, not finding what they seemingly expected, leave without further incident but the baffling, traumatic events overwhelm Cannon who dies in his sleep later that night. Now Russell is left to ponder the meaning of the attack, what to do with the poet's unfinished, problematic memoir and, perhaps most importantly, how to reconstruct and move forward with his own life. Hearing of the disturbing circumstances of Cannon's death, an Italian writer, Marina Vezzoli, invites Russell to recuperate at her villa in Tuscany. But what at first seems like a generous invitation slowly reveals itself to be a calculated offer. As Russell's stay in Italy lengthens, he begins to realize that the people in his life are using or manipulating him, most of all the poet's New York publishers who, against the dying man's wishes, are trying to acquire his unfinished manuscript. Looming over everything is the long and fascinating legacy of Villa Guidi, where during Word War II a Jewish family hid in the subterranean floors, later undergoing a conversion to Catholicism. In an echo of this dramatic history, Russell is forced to undergo a conversion of his own in order to find redemption and meaning in his life." PUBLISHER.
By Jamie O'Neill.
In a story set against the backdrop of Dublin in 1915, two boys who meet at the local swimming hole plan to swim to an island in Dublin Bay the following Easter, but their plans coincide with the Easter uprising--a historic rebellion that changes their lives.
By Abigail Padgett.
Blue McCarron and Roxanne Bouchie hunt for a San Diego serial killer know as the "Sword of Heaven" who stalks women in power and leaves behind blue willow plates.
By Felice Picano.
Ray is restless as his lover, Jesse, dies of AIDS until he meets Mike Tedesco.
By Annie Proulx.
The story of Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, two cowboys who share a small tent while working as herders and camp tenders during a summer spent on a range far above the tree line. They fall into a relationship that at first seems solely sexual but then reveals itself to be something more. Both men marry and have families, but over the course of many years and frequent separations they find their relationship becomes the most important thing in both their lives, and they do anything they can to maintain it. Proulx's description of their bond is beautiful and haunting and often brutal in its portrayal of the hardships, and ultimately the violence, they face.
By by John Rechy.
"Loosely inspired by Henry Fielding's The History of Tom Jones but set in the present, The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens follows the journey of the charming, handsome Lyle Clemens, the son of a Miss America aspirant and an unknown father, as he travels through the religious fundamentalist world of Texas to the gambling palaces of Las Vegas and the enticing traps of Los Angeles's mythologies." "As Lyle approaches adulthood, everyone wants him to be something he's not. His beautiful mother wants to make him into a reflection of the cowboy who abandoned her; a group of avaricious fundamentalists, somehow related to a mysterious "curse" in his mother's past, plot to convert him into "the Lord's Cowboy" to rouse their televangelical empire to new frenzied heights; the lovely Maria wants him to fulfill her varying fantasies of "true love." When Lyle leaves home to make his own destiny, he encounters a gallery of charlatans and wistful souls, quirky gamblers, fake magicians, dreamy showgirls, and wily pornographers. He is seduced into an aging starlet's mad comeback scheme during a rambunctious Academy Awards ceremony. Through it all, Lyle struggles to become himself."--BOOK JACKET.
By Mary Renault.
A slave-boy in the household of Alexander the Great tells about the adventures of the Macedonian king during the last seven years of his life.
By Robert Rodi.
With the help of a "fusion witch" named Francesca, millionaire Jack Ackerly switches bodies with a hot young party boy named Corey Szaslo in an attempt to recapture his youth, and as they each live their new lives to the fullest, reality sets in when Jack's former lover returns.
By Jeffrey Sharlach.
The novel tells the story of a young gay advertising executive struggling to find himself and true love in 1970's New York. Author Jeffrey Sharlach paints a picture of life in New York for a gay man at that moment in history. From the streets of Greenwich Village to summers on Fire Island to the dawn of AIDS, Sharlach writes with humor, poignancy, and charm, presenting characters who are universal in their appeal. Running in Bed's incomparable, evocative images will resonate with readers, regardless of their personal.
By Michael Sledge.
The intensely private and much-revered real-life poet Elizabeth Bishop is vividly and imaginatively portrayed in Sledge?s debut novel about Elizabeth?s time in Brazil and her lengthy relationship with the riveting, mercurial Lota de Macedo Soares.
By
In this wickedly comic, cross-country, time-bending journey, John confronts his own—and the nation’s—blunders, learning that a second chance at changing things for the better also brings new opportunities to screw them up. Through edgy humor, time travel, and droll one-liners, Bob Smith examines family dysfunction, suicide, New York City, and recent American history while effortlessly blending domestic comedy with science fiction.
By Tom Spanbauer.
In 1967, seventeen-year-old Rigby John Klusener leaves his hometown in Idaho to hitchhike to San Francisco, where he must face his fears and his own sexuality.
By Richard Stevenson.
Gay PI Strachey is retained by one of a pair of rich retired lovers to investigate Barry Fields, the young spouse-to-be (the setting is in Massachusetts) of their middle-aged friend Bill Moore.
By Colm Tóibín.
A collection of short fiction includes "The Street," in which Pakistani workers in Barcelona pursue a taboo affair; and "Two Women," in which a taciturn Irish set designer confronts repressed emotions while working in her homeland.
By Gore Vidal.
The remarkable bestseller about the fourth-century Roman emperor who famously tried to halt the spread of Christianity, Julian is widely regarded as one of Gore Vidal’s finest historical novels.
By by Patricia Nell Warren.
Patricia Nell Warren is the landmark author of some of the most popular gay novels of all time.. Her most beloved work, The Front Runner, has sold an estimated ten million copies in ten languages. The first modern story about gay love to become an international bestseller, Warren’s saga of an ex-Marine track coach and his Olympics-bound athlete has engaged and inspired both gay and mainstream readers for over a quarter of a century.
By Edmund White.
Traces the decades-long friendship of Jack Holmes and Will Wright, which is marked by Jack's secret love for Will, Will's marriage in spite of conflicted sexual feelings, and the devastating rise of AIDS.
By John Morgan Wilson.
Benjamin Justice was once one of the most prominent and respected journalists in Los Angeles, even the country. But when it was discovered that he'd invented the sources for his Pulitzer Prize winning series of articles, he lost everything - his job, his reputation, his friends. Now, many years later, Justice has finally published a memoir revealing the truth behind the events that cost him so much and made him permanently radioactive in the journalism community. And this book may be his last chance to turn things around, to make a living writing as he'd always wanted.But his memoir brings out more than the truth - it brings out long-forgotten , long hidden ghosts from his past. And Justice finds himself, and everyone/everything he holds dear under attack.
By Jeanette Winterson.
After rendering the planet unlivable, humankind begins to colonize a new blue planet, and heroine Billie Crusoe embarks on a personal odyssey into the future, in an adventure that explores humankind's relationship to the environment, power, and technology.
