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And the Band Played on
by Randy Shilts

ISBN 0312241356 (0-312-24135-6)
Softcover, St Martins Pr

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Book summary:
In the first major book on AIDS, San Francisco Chronicle reporter Randy Shilts examines the making of an epidemic. Shilts researched and reported the book exhaustively, chronicling almost day-by-day the first five years of AIDS. His work is critical of the medical and scientific communities' initial response and particularly harsh on the Reagan Administration, who he claims cut funding, ignored calls for action and deliberately misled Congress. Shilts doesn't stop there, wondering why more people in the gay community, the mass media and the country at large didn't stand up in anger more quickly. The AIDS pandemic is one of the most striking developments of the late 20th century and this is the definitive story of its beginnings. [via]
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At Swim, Two Boys
by Jamie O'Neill

ISBN 0743222954 (0-7432-2295-4)
Softcover, Scribner

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You may have read the hype. Irishman Jamie O'Neill was working as a London hospital porter when his 10-year labor of love, the 200,000-word manuscript of At Swim, Two Boys, written on a laptop during quiet patches at work, was suddenly snapped up for a hefty six-figure advance. For once, the book fully deserves the hype.
In the spring of 1915, Jim Mack and "the Doyler," two Dublin boys, make a pact to swim to an island in Dublin Bay the following Easter. By the time they do, Dublin has been consumed by the Easter Uprising, and the boys' friendship has blossomed into love--a love that will in time be overtaken by tragedy. O'Neill's prose, playing merrily with vocabulary, syntax, and idiom, has unsurprisingly drawn comparisons to James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, but in his creation of comic characters (such as Jim's pathetic but irrepressible father) and in the sheer scale of his work, Charles Dickens springs to mind first. But Dickens never wrote a love story between young men as achingly beautiful as this.
In the character of Anthony MacMurrough, who is haunted by voices as he pursues his illegal and dangerous desire for Dublin boys, O'Neill has created a complex and fascinating center to his novel, rescuing the love story from mawkishness, and allowing a serious meditation on history, politics, and desire. For as Ireland seeks its own future free of British government, so Jim, Doyle, and MacMurrough look back to Sparta to find a way to live. As Dr Scrotes, one of MacMurrough's voices, commands:
Help these boys build a nation of their own. Ransack the histories for clues to their past. Plunder the literature for words they can speak.
In this massive, enthralling, and brilliant debut, Jamie O'Neill has indeed done just that: provided a nation for what Walt Whitman calls, in O'Neill's epigraph, "the love of comrades." --Alan Stewart, Amazon.co.uk [via]
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Babycakes
by Armistead Maupin

ISBN 0060924837 (0-06-092483-7)
Softcover, Perennial

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"An extended love letter to a magical San Francisco."
--New York Times Book Review
When an ordinary househusband and his ambitious wife decide to start a family, they discover there's more to making a baby then meets the eye. Help arrives in the form of a grieving gay neighbor, a visiting monarch, and the dashing young lieutenant who defects from her yacht. Bittersweet and profoundly affecting, Babycakes was the first work of fiction to acknowledge the arrival of AIDS.

"Armistead is a true original. His tales are bang up-to-date. They will surprise and maybe even shock you, but, I promise, they will make you laugh."
--Ian McKellen
"Maupin has a genius for observation. His characters have the timing of vaudeville comics, flawed by human frailty and fueled by blind hop."
--Denver Post
"Armistead Maupin's San Francisco saga careens beautifully on."
-- New York Times Book Review
[via]
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Back to Barbary Lane: The Final Tales of the City Omnibus
by Armistead Maupin

ISBN 0060166495 (0-06-016649-5)
Hardcover, HarperCollins Canada, Limited

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Book summary:
"An old fashioned pleasure... there's been nothing like it since the heyday of the serial novel 100 years ago... Tearing through [the tales] one after the other, as I did, allows instant gratification; it also lets you appreciate how masterfully they're constructed. No matter what Maupin writes next, he can look back on the rare achievement of having built a little world and made it run."
--Walter Kendrick, Village Voice Literary Supplement
By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Armistead Maupin's bestselling Tales of the City series stands as an incomparable blend of great storytelling and incisive social commentary. These six classic comedies, some of which originally appeared as serials in San Francisco newspapers, have won Maupin critical acclaim around the world and enthralled legions of devoted fans.
Back to Barbary Lane comprises the second trilogy of the series--Babycakes (1984), Significant Others (1987), and Sure of You (1989) -- concluding the saga of the tenants, past and present, of Mrs. Madrigal's beloved apartment house on Russian Hill. While the first trilogy celebrated the carefree excesses of the seventies, this volume tracks its hapless, all-to-human cast across a decade troubled by plague, deceit and overweening ambition.
Like its companion volume, 28 Barbary Lane, Back to Barbary Lane is distinguished by what The Guardian of London has called "some of the sharpest and most speakable dialogue you are ever likely to read." It promises hours of literate entertainment for readers old and new.
With a foreword by the author. [via]
More editions of Back to Barbary Lane: The Final Tales of the City Omnibus:
- Back to Barbary Lane: The Final Tales of the City Omnibus: ISBN 0060166495 (0-06-016649-5)
  Hardcover, HarperCollins Canada, Limited
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Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story
by Paul Monette, Kathryn Harrison

ISBN 0060595647 (0-06-059564-7)
Softcover, Perennial

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Book summary:
Paul Monette first made a name for himself in 1978 with his debut novel, Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll, a comic romp with serious overtones. He established himself as a writer of popular fiction with three more novels before he and his lover were both diagnosed with HIV. In 1988 he wrote On Borrowed Time, a memoir of living with AIDS and of his lover's death. The passion and anger that fueled On Borrowed Time surfaces again in 1992's Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, his National Book Award-winning autobiography. Although it follows the traditional structure of the autobiography and bildungsroman--early family life, education, reflections on how art influenced the subject's view of life--Becoming a Man also filters Monette's story through two central facts: the closet and AIDS. Monette writes of the pain of being closeted, the effect it had on his writing, and how it shaped (and often destroyed) his relationships. Monette's fear and fury at AIDS and homophobia heighten the same skill and imagination he put into his fiction. This vision--poetic yet highly political, angry yet infused with the love of life--is what transforms Becoming a Man from simple autobiography into an intense record of struggle and salvation. Paul Monette did not lead a life different from many gay men--he struggled courageously with his family, his sexuality, his AIDS diagnosis--but in bearing witness to his and others' pain, he creates a personal testimony that illuminates the darkest corners of our culture even as it finds unexpected reserves of hope. [via]
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Boy Meets Boy
by David Levithan

ISBN 0375832998 (0-375-83299-8)
Softcover, Random House Childrens Books

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In this delightful young adult novel for readers 12 and up, high school sophomore Paul says, "There isnt really a gay scene or a straight scene in our town. They got all mixed up a while back, which I think is for the best." And, as he observes at the end of the story, "It's a wonderful world." Paul has both gay and straight friends, and they all hang out together at terrific bookstores and concerts, and advise one another on the sometimes troubled progress of their various romances. Paul is smitten with Noah, and they are beginning a serious relationship when Kyle, Pauls ex, complicates things by deciding that all is forgiven. Joni is going out with Chuck, who dominates her, much to her friends' disapproval. Tonys conservative parents refuse to acknowledge that he is gay, so the others must bone up on Bible verses all week so they can pretend Saturday night is a study group. And then there's Infinite Darlene, football quarterback and Homecoming Queen, who deserves a whole romance novel of her own. Life in their town is gloriously accepting of differences and only occasionally verges on magic realism, in this first novel in which same sex preference is not the problem. --Patty Campbell [via]
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A Boy's Own Story
by Edmund White

ISBN 0375707409 (0-375-70740-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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For more than two decades, Edmund White has been widely recognized as Americas preeminent gay writer. He has a novelists eye for the telling detail or the remarkable phrase and, like Proust himself, concentrates upon the minutiae of the past so that it might live again, wrote The New York Times Book Review. White possesses the rare combination of a po-etic sense of language and an ironic sense of humor, declared Newsweek. [He] is unquestionably the foremost American gay novelist. Commemorating the twentieth anni-versary of A Boys Own Story, this Modern Library edition presents Whites autobiographical novel together with an Introduction by prizewinning novelist Allan Gurganus and a new Afterword by the author himself.

A Boys Own Story, with equal parts stunning lyricism and unabashed humor, traces a nameless narrators coming-of-age in the 1950s. Struggling with his homosexuality, the narrator seeks the consolations of a fantastic imagination and fills his head with romantic expectations (I believed without a doubt in a better world, which was adulthood or New York or Paris or love.) His distant, divorced parents exacerbate his hunger for emotional connection, and he endures the unhelpful attentions of a priest and a psychoanalyst. In time, he recognizes the need to be loved by the men in his life and, in the surprising conclusion, escapes his childhood forever with one unforgettable act.

With A Boys Own Story, American literature is larger by one classic novel, wrote The Washington Post Book World. No reader, straight or gay . . . can fail to experience shock after shock of recognition in these pages, and few, I would bet, will be able to withhold a one-to-one sympathy from the unnamed narrator, even when he is being, by the standards of only yesterday, shocking. [via]
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Brokeback Mountain : Now a Major Motion Picture
by E. Annie Proulx

ISBN 0743275306 (0-7432-7530-6)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster

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Book summary:
Annie Proulx has written some of the most original and brilliant short stories in contemporary literature, and for many readers and reviewers, "Brokeback Mountain" is her masterpiece.
Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, two ranch hands, come together when they're working as sheepherder and camp tender one summer on a range above the tree line. At first, sharing an isolated tent, the attraction is casual, inevitable, but something deeper catches them that summer.
Both men work hard, marry, and have kids because that's what cowboys do. But over the course of many years and frequent separations this relationship becomes the most important thing in their lives, and they do anything they can to preserve it.
The New Yorker won the National Magazine Award for Fiction for its publication of "Brokeback Mountain," and the story was included in Prize Stories 1998: The O. Henry Awards. In gorgeous and haunting prose, Proulx limns the difficult, dangerous affair between two cowboys that survives everything but the world's violent intolerance. [via]
More editions of Brokeback Mountain : Now a Major Motion Picture:
- Brokeback Mountain : Now a Major Motion Picture: ISBN 0743275306 (0-7432-7530-6)
  Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
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Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay
by Annie Proulx

ISBN 1857029402 (1-85702-940-2)
Softcover, Fourth Estate

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Book summary:
Annie Proulx has written some of the most original and brilliant short stories in contemporary literature, and for many readers and reviewers, "Brokeback Mountain" is her masterpiece.
Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, two ranch hands, come together when they're working as sheepherder and camp tender one summer on a range above the tree line. At first, sharing an isolated tent, the attraction is casual, inevitable, but something deeper catches them that summer.
Both men work hard, marry, and have kids because that's what cowboys do. But over the course of many years and frequent separations this relationship becomes the most important thing in their lives, and they do anything they can to preserve it.
The New Yorker won the National Magazine Award for Fiction for its publication of "Brokeback Mountain," and the story was included in Prize Stories 1998: The O. Henry Awards. In gorgeous and haunting prose, Proulx limns the difficult, dangerous affair between two cowboys that survives everything but the world's violent intolerance. [via]
More editions of Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay:
- Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay: ISBN 0743271327 (0-7432-7132-7)
  Softcover, Simon & Schuster
- Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay: ISBN 1857029402 (1-85702-940-2)
  Softcover, Fourth Estate
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Dancer from the Dance
by Andrew Holleran

ISBN 0060937068 (0-06-093706-8)
Softcover, Harpercollins

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Book summary:
Set in the 1970s, this book tells the tragic story of Malone, the most beautiful man in gay New York. The author has also written "Eight Nights in Arabia" and "Ground Zero". [via]
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A Density of Souls
by Christopher Rice

ISBN 0786886463 (0-7868-8646-3)
Softcover, Miramax

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Book summary:
Take the sensuous, fecund New Orleans setting, add a generous helping of tangled Southern family history, and season liberally with a sensitive teenage boy rejected by his friends and frightened of his own homoerotic impulses and you wouldn't be surprised to discover that the novel containing all of the above was written by someone named Rice. But a few paragraphs into the first page, it's clear that Anne Rice's son's first novel isn't about vampires or witches and does not otherwise read like one of her exceedingly popular books. The only family resemblance is in the setting, the sexual orientation of the lovingly described male characters, and the scent of overripe magnolias.
There's murder, suicide, and madness at the heart of this rather clumsy coming-of-age story, which focuses on the youthful friendship of Stephen Conlin, Meredith Ducote, Greg Darby, and Brandon Charbonnet. This friendship is destroyed by a sexual incident that takes place just before the foursome enters Cannon, an exclusive prep school. There, Stephen is ostracized by his former friends, now the most popular kids on campus, who'd just as soon forget their own complicity in the event. Envy, passion, and rage drive the narrative, but the emotions are as juvenile as the characters, and the long passages depicting the rituals and cruelties of high school, from pep rallies to football games, slow down the pace without really illuminating character or motivation. The novel reads like a roman à clef. Rice might have been wiser to tell someone else's story rather than his own. --Jane Adams [via]
More editions of A Density of Souls:
- A Density of Souls: ISBN 0786866462 (0-7868-6646-2)
  Hardcover, Hyperion Books
- A Density of Souls: ISBN 0786886463 (0-7868-8646-3)
  Softcover, Miramax
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Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
by David Sedaris

ISBN 0316010790 (0-316-01079-0)
Softcover, Little Brown & Co

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Book summary:
It just isnt fair: most of us would be lucky to be able to express ourselves in writing half as well as David Sedaris does in his new book, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. But on top of his skills with the written word, the author also has substantial gifts as a performer, and he proves this on the audio version of the book. In his essay The Change in Me,Sedaris remembers that his mother was good at imitating people, and its clear that he takes after her. Whether hes doing impressions of high-voiced brother Paul, or recalling times when he and his sisters tried to win good karma by speaking and acting like well-behaved, fairytale children, Sedariss nuanced performance hits the right note on both the opening, comedic stories, and the more poignant essays that tend to come later in the reading. In fact, for those who have already read some of the best stories in other publications including The New Yorker, the CD or cassette version of this collection is probably the best bet for furthering your appreciation of the material.
Sedariss career is closely linked with two things: audio (he was discovered by NPRs Ira Glass), and the personal lives of himself and his family. In Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, he describes fights with his boyfriend, and his sister-in-laws difficult pregnancy. When sister Lisa complains about the stories involving the family, he writes about that, too. Sedaris's latest provides more evidence that he is a great humorist, memoirist and raconteur, and readers are lucky to have the opportunity to know him so well. Perhaps they are luckier still not to know him personally. --Leah Weathersby [via]
More editions of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim:
- Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim: ISBN 0316143464 (0-316-14346-4)
  Hardcover, Little Brown & Co
- Dress Your Family In Corduroy And Denim: ISBN 0316010790 (0-316-01079-0)
  Softcover, Little Brown & Co
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The Front Runner
by Patricia Nell Warren

ISBN 0964109964 (0-9641099-6-4)
Softcover, Wildcat Pr

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Book summary:
First published in 1974, The Front Runner raced to international acclaim - the first novel about gay love to become popular with mainstream.
In 1975, coach Harlan Brown is hiding from his past at an obscure New York college, after he was fired from Penn State University on suspicion of being gay. A tough, lonely ex-Marine of 39, Harlan has never allowed himself to love another man.
Then Billy Sive, a brilliant young runner, shows up on his doorstep. He and his two comrades, Vince Matti and Jacques LaFont, were just thrown off a major team for admitting they are gay. Harlan knows that, with proper training, Billy could go to the '76 Olympics in Montreal. He agrees to coach the three boys under strict conditions that thwart Billy's growing attraction for his mature but compelling mentor. The lean, graceful front runner with gold-rim glasses sees directly into Harlan's heart. Billy's gentle and open acceptance of his sexuality makes Harlan afraid to confront either the pain of his past, or the challenges which lay in wait if their intimacy is exposed.
But when Coach Brown finds himself falling in love with his most gifted athlete, he must combat his true feelings for Billy or risk the outrage of the entire sports world - and their only chance at Olympic gold. [via]
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Further Tales of the City
by Armistead Maupin

ISBN 0060924926 (0-06-092492-6)
Softcover, Harpercollins

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Book summary:
The calamity-prone residents of 28 barbary lane are at it again in this deliciously dark novel of romance and betrayal. While anna madrigal imprisons an anchorwoman in her basement, michael tolliver looks for love at the national gay rodeo, dede halcyon day and mary ann singleton track a charismatic psychopath across alaska, and society columnist prue giroux loses her heart to a derelict living in san francisco park [via]
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Geography Club
by Brent Hartinger

ISBN 0060012234 (0-06-001223-4)
Softcover, Harpercollins Childrens Books

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Book summary:
Russel Middlebrook is convinced he's the only gay kid at Goodkind High School. Then his online gay-chat buddy turns out to be none other than Kevin, the popular but closeted star of the school's baseball team. Soon Russel meets other gay students too. There's his best friend, Min, who reveals that she's bisexual, and her soccer-playing girlfriend, Terese. And there's Terese's politically active friend, Ike.

But how can kids this diverse get together without drawing attention to themselves?

"We just choose a club that's so boring, nobody in their right mind would ever in a million years join it. We could call it Geography Club!"

Brent Hartinger's debut novel is a fastpaced, funny, and trenchant portrait of contemporary teenagers who may not learn any actual geography in their latest school club, but who learn plenty about the treacherous social terrain of a typical American high school and the even more dangerous landscape of the human heart.
[via]
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Giovanni's Room
by James Baldwin

ISBN 0385334583 (0-385-33458-3)
Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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Book summary:
Set in the contemporary Paris of American expatraites, liasons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. James Baldwin's brilliant narrative delves into the mystery of loving with a sharp, probing imagination, and he creates a moving, highly controversial story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the heart. [via]
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Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past
by Martha Vicinus, George Chauncey, Martin Duberman

ISBN 0453006892 (0-453-00689-2)
Hardcover, New American Library

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Book summary:
A collection of 30 essays which explore homosexuality in various cultures, and different eras, from late imperial China and Renaissance Italy to "Jazz-Age" America and from London to Harlem and Japan. Other chapters look at male prostitutes, cross-dressing and schoolgirl crushes in public schools. [via]
More editions of Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past:
- Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past: ISBN 0453006892 (0-453-00689-2)
  Hardcover, New American Library
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Hidden from History : Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past
by Martin B. Duberman, Martha Vicinus, Chauncey, George, Jr.

ISBN 0452010675 (0-452-01067-5)
Softcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

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Book summary:
Winner of two Lambda Rising Awards. "A landmark of a book and a landmark of ideas that will shatter ignorance and delusion."Catharine Stimpson.
[via]
More editions of Hidden from History : Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past:
- Hidden from History : Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past: ISBN 0452010675 (0-452-01067-5)
  Softcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
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Home at the End of the World
by Michael Cunningham

ISBN 0312202318 (0-312-20231-8)
Softcover, Picador USA

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Book summary:
From Michael Cunningham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours, comes this widely praised novel of two boyhood friends: Jonathan, lonely, introspective, and unsure of himself; and Bobby, hip, dark, and inarticulate. In New York after college, Bobby moves in with Jonathan and his roommate, Clare, a veteran of the city's erotic wars. Bobby and Clare fall in love, scuttling the plans of Jonathan, who is gay, to father Clare's child. Then, when Clare and Bobby have a baby, the three move to a small house upstate to raise "their" child together and, with an odd friend, Alice, create a new kind of family. A Home at the End of the World masterfully depicts the charged, fragile relationships of urban life today.
[via]
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Home at the End of the World/30664
by Michael Cunningham

ISBN 0374172501 (0-374-17250-1)
Hardcover, Daedalus Books

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Two lifelong friends in their 20s form a triangle with a young woman in New York City. When she becomes pregnant, the three move to the country to set up housekeeping in Woodstock, embarking on a daring voyage toward a new vision of what a family can be. "A gripping, haunting piece of work from a writer of real promise and power".--Publishers Weekly. [via]
More editions of Home at the End of the World/30664:
- Home at the End of the World/30664: ISBN 0374172501 (0-374-17250-1)
  Hardcover, Daedalus Books
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The Line Of Beauty
by Alan Hollinghurst

ISBN 1582346100 (1-58234-610-0)
Softcover, St Martins Pr

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Book summary:

Interview with Alan Hollinghurst
Alan Hollinghurst's extraordinarily rich novel The Line of Beauty. has garnered a new level of acclaim for the author after winning the 2004 Man Booker Prize. Hollinghurst speaks about his work in our interview.
[via]
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Magical Thinking: True Stories
by Augusten Burroughs

ISBN 0312315953 (0-312-31595-3)
Softcover, St Martins Pr

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Book summary:
From the number-one bestselling author of Running with Scissors and Dry comes Augusten Burroughs's most eagerly anticipated collection yet: true stories that give voice to the thoughts that we all have but dare not mention.It begins with a Tang Instant-Breakfast Drink television commercial:"Yes, you, Augusten. You were great. We want you." I can now trace my manic adult tendencies to this moment. It was the first time I felt deeply thrilled about something just a fraction of an instant after being completely crushed. I believe those three words "We want you" were enough to cause my brain to rewire itself, and from then on, I would require more than other people....- from Magical Thinking's "Commercial Break"A contest of wills with a deranged cleaning lady. The execution of a rodent carried out with military precision and utter horror. Telemarketing revenge. A different kind of "roof work." Dating an undertaker who shows up in a minivan. This is the fabric of Augusten Burroughs's life: a collection of true stories that are universal in their appeal yet unabashedly intimate, stories that shine a flashlight into both dark and hilarious places. With Magical Thinking, Augusten Burroughs goes where other memoirists fear to tread. [via]
More editions of Magical Thinking: True Stories:
- Magical Thinking: True Stories: ISBN 0312315945 (0-312-31594-5)
  Hardcover, St. Martin's Press
- Magical Thinking: True Stories: ISBN 0312315953 (0-312-31595-3)
  Softcover, St Martins Pr
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Maurice
by E. M. Forster

ISBN 0393310329 (0-393-31032-9)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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Book summary:
Written during 1913 and 1914, Maurice deals with the then unmentionable subject of homosexuality. More unusual, it concerns a relationship that ends happily. [via]
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Me Talk Pretty One Day
by David Sedaris

ISBN 0316776963 (0-316-77696-3)
Softcover, Little Brown & Co

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Book summary:
David Sedaris became a star autobiographer on public radio, onstage in New York, and on bestseller lists, mostly on the strength of "SantaLand Diaries," a scathing, hilarious account of his stint as a Christmas elf at Macy's. (It's in two separate collections, both worth owning, Barrel Fever and the Christmas-themed Holidays on Ice.) Sedaris's caustic gift has not deserted him in his fourth book, which mines poignant comedy from his peculiar childhood in North Carolina, his bizarre career path, and his move with his lover to France. Though his anarchic inclination to digress is his glory, Sedaris does have a theme in these reminiscences: the inability of humans to communicate. The title is his rendition in transliterated English of how he and his fellow students of French in Paris mangle the Gallic language. In the essay "Jesus Shaves," he and his classmates from many nations try to convey the concept of Easter to a Moroccan Muslim. "It is a party for the little boy of God," says one. "Then he be die one day on two... morsels of... lumber," says another. Sedaris muses on the disputes between his Protestant mother and his father, a Greek Orthodox guy whose Easter fell on a different day. Other essays explicate his deep kinship with his eccentric mom and absurd alienation from his IBM-exec dad: "To me, the greatest mystery of science continues to be that a man could father six children who shared absolutely none of his interests."
Every glimpse we get of Sedaris's family and acquaintances delivers laughs and insights. He thwarts his North Carolina speech therapist ("for whom the word pen had two syllables") by cleverly avoiding all words with s sounds, which reveal the lisp she sought to correct. His midget guitar teacher, Mister Mancini, is unaware that Sedaris doesn't share his obsession with breasts, and sings "Light My Fire" all wrong--"as if he were a Webelo scout demanding a match." As a remarkably unqualified teacher at the Art Institute of Chicago, Sedaris had his class watch soap operas and assign "guessays" on what would happen in the next day's episode.
It all adds up to the most distinctively skewed autobiography since Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia. The only possible reason not to read this book is if you'd rather hear the author's intrinsically funny speaking voice narrating his story. In that case, get Me Talk Pretty One Day on audio. --Tim Appelo [via]
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Mi vida en rose / Me Talk Pretty One Day
by David Sedaris

ISBN 8497934903 (84-9793-490-3)
Softcover, Debolsillo

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More editions of Mi vida en rose / Me Talk Pretty One Day:
- Mi vida en rose / Me Talk Pretty One Day: ISBN 8497934903 (84-9793-490-3)
  Softcover, Debolsillo
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More Tales of the City
by Armistead Maupin

ISBN 0060929383 (0-06-092938-3)
Softcover, Harpercollins

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Book summary:
The tenants of 28 Barbary Lane have fled their cozy nest for adventures for afield. Mary Ann Singleton finds love at sea with a forgetful stranger, Mona Ramsey discovers her doppleganger in a desert whore-house, and Michael Tolliver bumps into a certain gynecologist in a seedy Mexican Bar. Meanwhile, their venerable landlady takes the biggest journey of all'without ever leaving home. A new, full color 16-page insert makes this seamless work complete.
"Maupin has always been a humane storyteller, and an accessible one. His life-is-good-but-sloppy soap operas are marked by solid craft, superb dialogue, and what used to be called heart."
--Entertainment Weekly
"Maupin writes with warmth, acuity and tremendous wit about ordinary people learning to live with themselves and one another. Read him."
--Harpers & Queen
"Sparkling entertainments...lit by a glowing humanity that brings each character to vivid, poignant life."
--Publishers Weekly
Don't miss the much anticipated continuation of the classic miniseries "Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City" premiering June 1998 and airing all summer on SHOWTIME. Check your local listings for times.
Visit the Tales of the City website at www.talesofthecity.com [via]
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Naked
by David Sedaris

ISBN 1568954867 (1-56895-486-7)
Hardcover, Wheeler Pub Inc

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Book summary:
Welcome to the hilarious, strange, elegiac, outrageous world of David Sedaris. In Naked, Sedaris turns the mania for memoir on its ear, mining the exceedingly rich terrain of his life, his family, and his unique worldview-a sensibility at once take-no-prisoners sharp and deeply charitable. A tart-tongued mother does dead-on imitations of her young son's nervous tics, to the great amusement of his teachers; a stint of Kerouackian wandering is undertaken (of course!) with a quadriplegic companion; a family gathers for a wedding in the face of imminent death. Through it all is Sedaris's unmistakable voice, without doubt one of the freshest in American writing. [via]
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Running With Scissors: A Memoir
by Augusten Burroughs

ISBN 1417666943 (1-4176-6694-3)
Hardcover, Bt Bound

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Book summary:
There is a passage early in Augusten Burroughs's harrowing and highly entertaining memoir, Running with Scissors, that speaks volumes about the author. While going to the garbage dump with his father, young Augusten spots a chipped, glass-top coffee table that he longs to bring home. "I knew I could hide the chip by fanning a display of magazines on the surface, like in a doctor's office," he writes, "And it certainly wouldn't be dirty after I polished it with Windex for three hours." There were certainly numerous chips in the childhood Burroughs describes: an alcoholic father, an unstable mother who gives him up for adoption to her therapist, and an adolescence spent as part of the therapist's eccentric extended family, gobbling prescription meds and fooling around with both an old electroshock machine and a pedophile who lives in a shed out back. But just as he dreamed of doing with that old table, Burroughs employs a vigorous program of decoration and fervent polishing to a life that many would have simply thrown in a landfill. Despite her abandonment, he never gives up on his increasingly unbalanced mother. And rather than despair about his lot, he glamorizes it: planning a "beauty empire" and performing an a capella version of "You Light Up My Life" at a local mental ward. Burroughs's perspective achieves a crucial balance for a memoir: emotional but not self-involved, observant but not clinical, funny but not deliberately comic. And it's ultimately a feel-good story: as he steers through a challenging childhood, there's always a sense that Burroughs's survivor mentality will guide him through and that the coffee table will be salvaged after all. --John Moe [via]
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Significant Others
by Armistead Maupin

ISBN 0060924810 (0-06-092481-0)
Softcover, HarperCollins Canada, Limited

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Book summary:
Tranquillity reigns in the ancient redwood forest until a women-only music festival sets up camp downriver from an all-male retreat for the ruling class. Among those entangled in the ensuing mayhem are a lovesick nurseryman, a panic-stricken philanderer, and the worlds most beautiful fat woman. Significant Others is Armistead Maupins cunningly observed meditation on marriage, friendship, and sexual nostalgia.
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Sure of You
by Armistead Maupin

ISBN 0060924845 (0-06-092484-5)
Softcover, Harpercollins

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Book summary:
A fiercely ambitious TV talk show host finds she must choose between national stardom in New York and a husband and child in San Francisco. Caught in the middle is their longtime friend, a gay man whose own future is even more uncertain. Wistful and compassionate, yet subversively funny, Sure of You could only come from Armistead Maupin.
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More editions of Sure of You:
- Sure of You: ISBN 0060161647 (0-06-016164-7)
  Hardcover, Harpercollins
- Sure of You: ISBN 0060924845 (0-06-092484-5)
  Softcover, Harpercollins
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Tales of the City
by Armistead Maupin

ISBN 0060964049 (0-06-096404-9)
Softcover, Harpercollins

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Book summary:
Since 1976, Maupin's Tales of the City has etched itself upon the hearts and minds of its readers, both straight and gay. From a groundbreaking newspaper serial in the San Francisco Chronicle to a bestselling novel to a critically acclaimed PBS series, Tales (all six of them) contains the universe--if not in a grain of sand, then in one apartment house. [via]
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