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› Find signed collectible books: 'Affinity'
Affinity is a tale of power and possession that Henry James himself might admire. In her first novel, Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters explored secrets and longing--capping off this lesbian romp with a utopian-socialist vision. Her intricate follow-up is just as sensual but infinitely darker, its moral more difficult to descry. Its stylistic and psychological rewards, however, are visible at every turn, the author's persuasive imagination matched by her gift for storytelling.
In late September 1874, Margaret Prior makes her way through the pentagons of London's Millbank Prison, a place of fearful symmetry and endless corridors. This plain woman on the verge of 30 has come to comfort those behind bars, several of whom Waters brings to instant, sad life. And our Lady Visitor plans to take her role dead seriously, having recovered from two years of nervous indolence in her family's Chelsea house. One person, however, makes her job a passion. Opening an inspection slit (or "eye" as these devices are known), Margaret hears "a perfect sigh, like a sigh in a story." Peering inward, she's confronted by the most erotic of visions--a woman turned toward the sun, caressing her cheek with a forbidden violet: "As I watched, she put the flower to her lips, and breathed upon it, and the purple of the petals gave a quiver and seemed to glow..."
Selina Dawes may indeed have the face of a Crivelli angel, but this medium is in for fraud and assault, her last session having gone very badly indeed. Suffice it to say that the first full encounter between these two very different women is enthralling. "You think spiritualism a kind of fancy," Selina riddles. "Doesn't it seem to you, now you are here, that anything might be real, since Millbank is?" And soon enough Margaret receives several viable signs of the supernatural: a locket disappears from her room, flowers mysteriously appear, and her dazzling friend knows everything about her. Strangest of all, Selina seems to love her.
As Margaret records her weekly prison forays, her own past comes into focus, notably her plans to travel to Italy with her first love (who is now her sister-in-law). But her current journal, she convinces herself, is to be very different from her last one, which "took as long to burn as human hearts, they say, do take." Meanwhile, Waters offers a narrative two-for-one, placing Margaret's diary cheek by jowl with Selina's chronicle of her pre-Millbank existence. This dispassionate, staccato record initially suggests that we can separate truth from desire. Or can we? What Waters's haunting creation leaves us with is a more painful reality--that knowledge and belief are entirely different things. --Kerry Fried [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Am I Blue?'
Teenagers are often confused about their sexual identity, and this confusion often puts them at risk. To combat this dilemma, 16 prominent young adult authors offer original short stories that explore aspects of growing up gay and lesbian or with gay or lesbian parents or friends. The stories cover a broad range of genres, styles, and tones, but each is entertaining. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Annie on My Mind'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story'
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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› Find signed collectible books: 'Boy Meets Boy'
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]
› Find signed collectible books: 'A Boy's Own Story'
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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› Find signed collectible books: 'Brokeback Mountain : Now a Major Motion Picture'
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]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay'
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]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fingersmith'
From the author of the New York Times Notable Book Tipping the Velvet and the award-winning Affinity: a spellbinding, twisting tale of a great swindle, of fortunes and hearts won and lost, set in Victorian London among a family of thieves.
Sue Trinder is an orphan, left as an infant in the care of Mrs. Sucksby, a "baby farmer," who raised her with unusual tenderness, as if Sue were her own. Mrs. Sucksby's household, with its fussy babies calmed with doses of gin, also hosts a transient family of petty thieves-fingersmiths-for whom this house in the heart of a mean London slum is home.
One day, the most beloved thief of all arrives-Gentleman, a somewhat elegant con man, who carries with him an enticing proposition for Sue: If she wins a position as the maid to Maud Lilly, a naïve gentlewoman, and aids Gentleman in her seduction, then they will all share in Maud's vast inheritance. Once the inheritance is secured, Maud will be left to live out her days in a mental hospital. With dreams of paying back the kindness of her adopted family, Sue agrees to the plan. Once in, however, Sue begins to pity her helpless mark and care for Maud Lilly in unexpected ways. . . . But no one and nothing is as it seems in this > Dickensian novel of thrills and surprises.
The New York Times Book Review has called Sarah Waters a writer of "consummate skill" and The Seattle Times has praised her work as "gripping, astute fiction that feeds the mind and the senses." Fingersmith marks a major leap forward in this young and brilliant career. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Fried Green Tomatoes At The Whistle Stop Cafe'
Folksy and fresh, endearing and affecting, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe is the now-classic novel of two women in the 1980s; of gray-headed Mrs. Threadgoode telling her life story to Evelyn, who is in the sad slump of middle age. The tale she tells is also of two women--of the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruth--who back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Alabama, a Southern kind of Cafe Wobegon offering good barbecue and good coffee and all kinds of love and laughter, even an occasional murder. And as the past unfolds, the present--for Evelyn and for us--will never be quite the same again...
"Airplanes and television have removed the Threadgoodes from the Southern scene. Happily for us, Fannie Flagg has preserved a whole community of them in a richly comic, poignant narrative that records the exuberance of their lives, the sadness of their departure. Idgie Threadgoode is a true original: Huckleberry Finn would have tried to marry her!"
--Harper Lee, Author of To Kill a Mockingbird
"A real novel and a good one... [from] the busy brain of a born storyteller."
--The New York Times
"It's very good, in fact, just wonderful."
--Los Angeles Times
"Funny and macabre."
--The Washington Post
"Courageous and wise."
--Houston Chronicle [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fun Home: Una Familia Tragicomica'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Further Tales of the City'
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]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Geography Club'
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]› Find signed collectible books: 'Giovanni's Room'
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]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Home at the End of the World'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Home at the End of the World/30664'
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]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Hours'
The Hours is both an homage to Virginia Woolf and very much its own creature. Even as Michael Cunningham brings his literary idol back to life, he intertwines her story with those of two more contemporary women. One gray suburban London morning in 1923, Woolf awakens from a dream that will soon lead to Mrs. Dalloway. In the present, on a beautiful June day in Greenwich Village, 52-year-old Clarissa Vaughan is planning a party for her oldest love, a poet dying of AIDS. And in Los Angeles in 1949, Laura Brown, pregnant and unsettled, does her best to prepare for her husband's birthday, but can't seem to stop reading Woolf. These women's lives are linked both by the 1925 novel and by the few precious moments of possibility each keeps returning to. Clarissa is to eventually realize:
There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined.... Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.As Cunningham moves between the three women, his transitions are seamless. One early chapter ends with Woolf picking up her pen and composing her first sentence, "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." The next begins with Laura rejoicing over that line and the fictional universe she is about to enter. Clarissa's day, on the other hand, is a mirror of Mrs. Dalloway's--with, however, an appropriate degree of modern beveling as Cunningham updates and elaborates his source of inspiration. Clarissa knows that her desire to give her friend the perfect party may seem trivial to many. Yet it seems better to her than shutting down in the face of disaster and despair. Like its literary inspiration, The Hours is a hymn to consciousness and the beauties and losses it perceives. It is also a reminder that, as Cunningham again and again makes us realize, art belongs to far more than just "the world of objects." --Kerry Fried [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Indelible Alison Bechdel'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Indelible Alison Bechdel: Confessions, Comix and Miscellaneous Dykes to Watch Out For'
Go behind the pen and into the psyche of "dyke to watch out for" Alison Bechdel, cartoon chronicler extraordinaire, as the inner workings of lesbiana's most quick-witted, longest-running social commentator are revealed. Illustrations throughout . [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Invasion of the Dykes to Watch Out for'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Laramie Project'
On October 7, 1998, a young gay man was discovered bound to a fence in the hills outside Laramie, Wyoming, savagely beaten and left to die in an act of hate that shocked the nation. Matthew Shepards death became a national symbol of intolerance, but for the people of Laramie the event was deeply personal, and its they we hear in this stunningly effective theater piece, a deeply complex portrait of a community.
From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Maurice'
A new edition of this novel, which although written in 1914, was not published until after the author's death in 1970 because of its homosexual content. It tells the story of a young man at Cambridge, who falls in love with another man who betrays him by turning to women. But then he meets someone else and finds happiness with him. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Middlesex'
"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974." And so begins Middlesex, the mesmerizing saga of a near-mythic Greek American family and the "roller-coaster ride of a single gene through time." The odd but utterly believable story of Cal Stephanides, and how this 41-year-old hermaphrodite was raised as Calliope, is at the tender heart of this long-awaited second novel from Jeffrey Eugenides, whose elegant and haunting 1993 debut, The Virgin Suicides, remains one of the finest first novels of recent memory.
Eugenides weaves together a kaleidoscopic narrative spanning 80 years of a stained family history, from a fateful incestuous union in a small town in early 1920s Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit; from the early days of Ford Motors to the heated 1967 race riots; from the tony suburbs of Grosse Pointe and a confusing, aching adolescent love story to modern-day Berlin. Eugenides's command of the narrative is astonishing. He balances Cal/Callie's shifting voices convincingly, spinning this strange and often unsettling story with intelligence, insight, and generous amounts of humor:
Emotions, in my experience aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." & I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic traincar constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." ... I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever.
When you get to the end of this splendorous book, when you suddenly realize that after hundreds of pages you have only a few more left to turn over, you'll experience a quick pang of regret knowing that your time with Cal is coming to a close, and you may even resist finishing it--putting it aside for an hour or two, or maybe overnight--just so that this wondrous, magical novel might never end. --Brad Thomas Parsons [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Misfits: Library Edition'
Kids who get called the worst names oftentimes find each other. That's how it was with us. Skeezie Tookis and Addie Carle and Joe Bunch and me. We call ourselves the Gang of Five, but there are only four of us. We do it to keep people on their toes. Make 'em wonder. Or maybe we do it because we figure that there's one more kid out there who's going to need a gang to be a part of. A misfit, like us.
Skeezie, Addie, Joe, and Bobby -- they've been friends forever. They laugh together, have lunch together, and get together once a week at the Candy Kitchen to eat ice cream and talk about important issues. Life isn't always fair, but at least they have each other -- and all they really want to do is survive the seventh grade.
That turns out to be more of a challenge than any of them had anticipated. Starting with Addie's refusal to say the Pledge of Allegiance and her insistence on creating a new political party to run for student council, the Gang of Five is in for the ride of their lives. Along the way they will learn about politics and popularity, love and loss, and what it means to be a misfit. After years of getting by, they are given the chance to stand up and be seen -- not as the one-word jokes their classmates have tried to reduce them to, but as the full, complicated human beings they are just beginning to discover they truly are. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'More Tales of the City'
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]
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Night Watch'
Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked-out streets, illicit partying, and sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, The Night Watch tells the story of four Londoners-three women and a young man with a past-whose lives, and those of their friends and lovers, connect in tragedy, stunning surprise and exquisite turns, only to change irreversibly in the shadow of a grand historical event. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit'
Jeanette, the protagonist of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and the author's namesake, has issues--"unnatural" ones: her adopted mam thinks she's the Chosen one from God; she's beginning to fancy girls; and an orange demon keeps popping into her psyche. Already Jeanette Winterson's semi-autobiographical first novel is not your typical coming-of-age tale.
Brought up in a working-class Pentecostal family, up North, Jeanette follows the path her Mam has set for her. This involves Bible quizzes, a stint as a tambourine-playing Sally Army officer and a future as a missionary in Africa, or some other "heathen state". When Jeanette starts going to school ("The Breeding Ground") and confides in her mother about her feelings for another girl ("Unnatural Passions"), she's swept up in a feverish frenzy for her tainted soul. Confused, angry and alone, Jeanette strikes out on her own path, that involves a funeral parlour and an ice-cream van. Mixed in with the so-called reality of Jeanette's existence growing up are unconventional fairy tales that transcend the everyday world, subverting the traditional preconceptions of the damsel in distress.
In Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Winterson knits a complicated picture of teenage angst through a series of layered narratives, incorporating and subverting fairytales and myths, to present a coherent whole, within which her stories can stand independently. Imaginative and mischievous, she is a born storyteller, teasing and taunting the reader to reconsider their worldview. --Nicola Perry [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Rubyfruit Jungle'
Born a bastard, Molly Bolt is adopted by a dirt-poor southern couple who want something better for their daughter. Molly plays doctor with the boys, beats up Leroy and loses her virginity to her girlfriend in sixth grade. As she grows to realize she's different, Molly decides not to apologize. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe'
Both highly praised and intensely controversial, this brilliant book produces dramatic evidence that at one time the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches not only sanctioned unions between partners of the same sex, but sanctified them--in ceremonies strikingly similar to heterosexual marriage ceremonies.
From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders'
The exuberant memoir of a man named James who became a woman named Jenny.
Shes Not There is the story of a person changing genders, the story of a person bearing and finally revealing a complex secret; above all, it is a love story.
By turns funny and deeply moving, Jennifer Finney Boylan explores the remarkable territory that lies between men and women, examines changing friendships, and rejoices in the redeeming power of family. Shes Not There is a portrait of a loving marriagethe love of James for his wife, Grace, and, against all odds, the enduring love of Grace for the woman who becomes her sister, Jenny.
To this extraordinary true story, Boylan brings the humorous, fresh voice that won her accolades as one of the best comic novelists of her generation. With her distinctive and winning perspective, Shes Not There explores the dramatic outward changes and unexpected results of life as a woman: Jenny fights the urge to eat salad, while James consumed plates of ribs; gone is the stability of one damn mood, all the damn time.
While Boylans own secret was unusual, to say the least, she captures the universal sense of feeling uncomfortable, out of sorts with the world, and misunderstood by her peers. Jenny is supported on her journey by her best friend, novelist Richard Russo, who goes from begging his friend to Be a man (in every sense of the word) to accepting her as an attractive, buoyant woman. The most unexpected thing, Russo writes in his Afterword to the book, is in how Jennys story we recognize our shared humanity.
As James evolves into Jennifer in scenes that are by turns tender, startling, and witty, a marvelously human perspective emerges on issues of love, sex, and the fascinating relationship between our physical and our intuitive selves. Through the clear eyes of a truly remarkable woman, Shes Not There provides a new window on the often confounding process of accepting ourselves.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Stone Butch Blues'
Published in 1993, this brave, original novel is considered to be the finest account ever written of the complexities of a transgendered existence. Woman or man? Thats the question that rages like a storm around Jess Goldberg, clouding her life and her identity. Growing up differently gendered in a blue--collar town in the 1950s, coming out as a butch in the bars and factories of the prefeminist 60s, deciding to pass as a man in order to survive when she is left without work or a community in the early 70s. This powerful, provocative and deeply moving novel sees Jess coming full circle, she learns to accept the complexities of being a transgendered person in a world demanding simple explanations: a he-she emerging whole, weathering the turbulence. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Tales of the City'
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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› Find signed collectible books: 'Tipping the Velvet: A Novel'
The heroine of Sarah Waters's audacious first novel knows her destiny, and seems content with it. Her place is in her father's seaside restaurant, shucking shellfish and stirring soup, singing all the while. "Although I didn't long believe the story told to me by Mother--that they had found me as a baby in an oyster-shell, and a greedy customer had almost eaten me for lunch--for eighteen years I never doubted my own oysterish sympathies, never looked far beyond my father's kitchen for occupation, or for love." At night Nancy Astley often ventures to the nearby music hall, not that she has illusions of being more than an audience member. But the moment she spies a new male impersonator--still something of a curiosity in England circa 1888--her years of innocence come to an end and a life of transformations begins.
Tipping the Velvet, all 472 pages of it, is as saucy, as tantalizing, and as touching as the narrator's first encounter with the seductive but shame-ridden Miss Kitty Butler. And at first even Nancy's family is thrilled with her gender-bending pal, all but her sister, best friend, and bedmate, Alice, "her eyes shining cold and dull, with starlight and suspicion." Not to worry. Soon Nancy and Kitty are off to London, their relationship close though (alas for our heroine) sisterly. We know that bliss will come, and it does, in an exceptionally charged moment. A lesser author would have been content to stop her story there, but Waters has much more in mind for her buttonholing heroine, and for us. In brief, her Everywoman with a sexual difference goes from success onstage to heartbreak to a stint as a male prostitute (necessity truly is the mother of invention) to keeping house for a brother and sister in the Labour movement. And did I mention her long stint as a plaything in the pleasure palace of a rich Sapphist extraordinaire? Diana Lethaby is as cruel as she is carnal, and even the well-concealed Cavendish Ladies' Club isn't outré enough for her. Kitting Nancy out in full, elegant drag, she dares the front desk to turn them away. "We are here," she mocks, "for the sake of the irregular."
Only after some seven years of hard twists and sensual turns does Nancy conclude that a life of sensation is not enough. Still, Tipping the Velvet is so entertaining that readers will wish her sentimental--and hedonistic--education had taken twice as long. --Kerry Fried [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Totally Joe'
Meet Joe Bunch. Lovable misfit and celebrity wannabe from Paintbrush Falls, New York. Like his longtime best friends Addie, Skeezie, and Bobby, Joe's been called names all his life. So when he's given the assignment to write his alphabiography -- the story of his life from A to Z -- Joe has his doubts. This whole thing could be serious ammunition for bullying if it falls into the wrong hands.
But Joe discovers there's more to the assignment -- and his life -- than meets the eye. Especially when he gets to the letter C, which stands for Colin Briggs, the coolest guy in the seventh grade (seriously) -- and Joe's secret boyfriend.
By the time Joe gets to the letter Z, he's pretty much bared his soul about everything. And Joe's okay with that because he likes who he is. He's Totally Joe, and that's the best thing for him to be.
Here is an exuberant, funny, totally original story of one boy's coming out -- and coming-of-age. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Well of Loneliness'
First published in 1928, this timeless portrayal of lesbian love is now a classic. The thinly disguised story of Hall's own life, it was banned outright upon publication and almost ruined her literary career. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Le Ore'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Die Studen'
Die Stunden ist eine Hommage an Virginia Woolf und zugleich ein sehr eigenständiges Werk. Während Michael Cunningham sein literarisches Idol zu neuem Leben erweckt, verflechtet er ihre Geschichte mit denen von zwei weiteren, eher zeitgenössischen Frauen. Eines grauen Morgens im Jahre 1923, in einem Vorort von London, erwacht Woolf von einem Traum, der bald zu ihrem Roman Mrs. Dalloway führen sollte. In der Gegenwart, an einem schönen Junitag in Greenwich Village in New York, bereitet die 52-jährige Clarissa Vaughan eine Party für ihre alte Liebe vor, einen Dichter, der an Aids stirbt. Und in Los Angeles im Jahre 1949 bemüht sich die schwangere und ruhelose Laura Brown so gut sie kann, sich für den Geburtstag ihres Mannes zurecht zu machen, kann aber irgendwie nicht aufhören, Woolf zu lesen. Das Leben dieser drei Frauen verbindet sowohl der Roman aus dem Jahre 1925 als auch die wenigen kostbaren Momente der Möglichkeit, zu denen sie alle immer wieder zurückkehren. Clarissa wird irgendwann zu folgender Feststellung kommen: "Als Trost gibt es nur dies: hier und da eine Stunde, wenn unser Leben -- entgegen aller Erwartungen -- sich zu öffnen scheint und uns alles schenkt, was wir uns jemals gewünscht haben... Trotzdem, wir lieben die Stadt, den Morgen; wir hoffen, mehr als alles andere, mehr zu bekommen."
Wenn Cunningham zwischen den drei Frauen hin- und herwechselt, sind die Übergänge völlig nahtlos. Ein Kapitel am Anfang des Buches endet damit, dass Woolf ihren Stift nimmt und ihren ersten Satz schreibt: "Mrs. Dalloway sagte, sie würde die Blumen selbst kaufen." Das nächste Kapitel beginnt damit, dass sich Laura an diesem Satz und an der literarischen Welt erfreut, in die sie gerade im Begriff ist, sich zu begeben. Clarissas Tag ist, auf der anderen Seite, ein Spiegelbild von Mrs. Dalloways -- allerdings mit einem entsprechenden Maß an moderner Angleichung, da Cunningham seine Quelle der Inspiration aktualisiert und ausfeilt. Clarissa weiß, daß ihr Wunsch, ihrem Freund eine perfekte Party zu bieten, für viele trivial erscheinen mag. Sie findet das jedoch besser, als sich dem Unglück und der Verzweiflung zu verschließen. Wie seine literarische Inspiration ist Die Stunden eine Hymne an das Bewusstsein und an die Schönheit und die Verluste, die man damit wahrnimmt. Es erinnert uns auch daran -- wie uns Cunningham immer wieder bewusst macht -- dass Kunst bei weitem nicht nur "der Welt der Gegenstände" angehört. --Kerry Fried [via]
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