Fiction:

Letters to Montgomery Clift by Noël Alumit
In the midst of the atrocities of the Marcos regime, young Bong Bong Luwad is smuggled out of the Philippines and sent to LA to live with his Auntie Yuna, who turns out to be a neglectful, abusive alcoholic. And that's just the beginning. Drawing inspiration from his aunt's letters to "saints and dead relatives," Bong starts writing letters to - you guessed it - Montgomery Clift, and the preteen crush evolves over time into either an obsessive delusion or an authentic haunting or some combination of the two. As Bong approaches his teenage years, things fall apart: Yuna disappears; he is placed in a series of foster homes; he begins self-mutilating and experimenting with drugs to convince himself he's alive; he contacts Amnesty International to initiate a search for his missing parents. His final foster placement is with a wealthy Filipino family with a dangerous and blackly ironic connection to Bong's past. When the secret comes out, Bong is catapulted into a frenzy of madness and self-destruction. Bong's downward spiral is almost unbearable at times, but Alumit never falls into the trap of milking his character's horrific circumstances for cheap sympathy. With rare skill and a laconic tenderness, he guides the reader through hell and back. This brilliant, harrowing debut novel is hard to put down and harder to forget. Highly recommended. - Marshall Moore

Interesting Monsters by Aldo Alvarez
A sly, brainy, delicately shaded novel masquerading as a postmodern short story collection, Aldo Alvarez's debut is like an offbeat dinner guest who ends up as the life of the party. Most of these 16 stories offer a fragment in an ongoing (though out-of-sequence) tale of the love relationship of Mark, a brooding, slightly homophobic music producer, and Dean, an antiques appraiser, who tests the tolerance of his new love interests by making a queeny display of himself on first dates. With malice toward none, and humor for all, Alvarez builds a network of complicated but very real connections, in a voice that is spare and surprising.

Hasty Hearts by Ken Anderson
Ken Anderson's Hasty Hearts is a collection of short fiction and includes his full length novel, Someone Bought the House on the Island. His work reads like a long, wet dream filled with tranquil locations, perfect men and hot sex alfresco. His leisurely pace reflects the serenity of the Georgia mountains where much of his work is set, and his erotica is refreshingly intelligent where the characters indulge both their bodies and their minds.

His novel focuses on Kevin, a newbie to the gay scene living in the rural mountains of Georgia. He is slowly immersed in the sex and vices of the early 70's, exposed not only to adventurous gay sex, but also culture, technology and the power of money. He is inducted by Dieter, the handsome, rich and mysterious owner of the house on the island. He maintains an entourage of beautiful boys and is obsessively vigilant about his privacy. Kevin has to unravel the mystery of the man he loves before succumbing to the hedonism of his new friends. One part thriller, two parts literotica, Someone Bought the House on the Island is a great read. - SM

Testosterone by James Robert Baker
Dean Seagrave is a crazed L.A. artist with a vendetta. His heart has been broken and his house burned down--all his books and art, even the only manuscript of his new graphic novel, Testosterone, destroyed, along with his good nature and his sense of restraint. Now he's careening through Los Angeles on the trail of his loser ex-boyfriend, Pablo Ortega, who had promised fidelity but turned out to be a "sleazy little scumbag beaner tearoom queen," an "emotional serial killer" who simply chose Dean as his latest victim.

Tim & Pete by James Robert Baker
James Robert Baker's groundbreaking novel of simmering rage and justifiable violence is follows combative ex-lovers Tim and Pete as they are thrown together on a bizarre trek from Laguna Beach, Calif., to Los Angeles. But it is when they find themselves on the trail of an anarchist gang of queers that Baker's novel takes off with a roar. Sarcastic, satiric, violent, and exhilarating, Tim & Pete is a fantastically imagined, boldly realized vision of the cultural war that continues to rage in the hearts of the disenfranchised and in the streets of America.

Ratz are Nice: (PSP) by Lawrence Ytzhak Braithwaite
Ratz Are Nice (PSP), lightning as literature: disorienting, disturbing, and dangerous. A white-hot explosion of oi/punk rhythms tells the story of a volatile combination of skinhead cultures existing in uneasy balance on Victoria's meaner streets. This is an excursion into the inner circle with Edison, a black skinhead, as guide, as he recounts in startling multiethnic lyrical phrasing the terrifying and tragic interlocking stories of Sparker and Quex, the leaders of two rival crews; the deadly and dangerous Prochain; and Elie, the young freshcut who connects them all. Visceral imagery combines with startling language in this challenging novel, where sexuality and ethnicity blur and neofascism and Nazism overlap with rudeboy culture and street punk, where what you see is not what is there and no one is what they seem.

The Wild Boys by William Burroughs
A surreal adventure in a near-future post-war setting, where a rebel band of teenage boys (often naked) battle the repressive armies of police in a revolution for freedom. The cinematic quality of the writing, as well as the ethereal homo-erotic text, makes it one of Burroughs' standouts. Not as impenetrable as some of his "druggier" work, nor as "journalistic" as his early work... a good place to start for a reader who is not familiar with his work. - SM

Edinburgh by Alexander Chee
Submerged secrets are at the heart of Alexander Chee's first novel, Edinburgh. This poetic triptych of stories reveals the entangled passions of three generations of men; a pederast, his victim, and the molestor's adult son.

Fee, a Korean-American boy, is fettered with the knowledge that his choir director, Big Eric, is systematically molesting his friends. He keeps his silence for fear of admitting his own similar urges for the boys, namely the angelic Peter, his best friend. This silence destroys Peter, and nearly take's Fee's life. When he finally accepts himself, and builds a future with another man, he is faced with one last challenge, his unfulfilled love of Peter.

The first section of the novel buries all of Fee's secrets, the second uncovers them through the intervention of Big Eric's son, Edward — a young man questioning his own sexuality — and the third section allows Fee to free himself from the past.

Edinburgh is a strong and compelling novel that touches on the mental brutality of child molestation, and the pain that child must endure to become whole. - SM

Frisk by Dennis Cooper
Cooper says, "I present the actual act of evil so it's visible and give it a bunch of facets so that you can actually look at it and experience it. You're seduced into dealing with it. ... So with Frisk, whatever pleasure you got out of making a picture in your mind based on ... those people being murdered, you take responsibility for it." In unsparingly confessional mode, Cooper leads the reader into a confrontation with what they get out of fantasized scenes of violence. A brilliant novel -- not a genre horror work but, rather, a critique of the power of genre.

My Loose Thread by Dennis Cooper
Dennis Cooper my well be the David Lynch of queer culture. His shockaholic fiction ignores the superficial and drives straight down the dark road of teenaged boys emotionally ruined by the fragmented environments they inhabit. My Loose Thread is no exception, and is a tight and destructive addition to his marganalized opus.

The novel centers on Larry, a boy who has so little control over his own life and sexual drives that he numbly repeats, "I'm really confused" like a modern-day mantra. He's got a lot of baggage, with an accidental slaying of a boy who loved him, a sexually abusive relationship with his 13 year old brother, and an overpowering rage when he fucks other men. He's not gay, he claims, and he's not alone; Larry's world is overflowing with guys who aren't gay, but turn their sex into violence like off-screen heroes, the boys from Columbine who killed fellow students in a secret pact because they couldn't have sex. This is a study in dysfunctional American "culture" that worships violence over intimacy.

As graphic as the alluded to sex and violence becomes, Cooper maintains a clinical distance that forces you into a submissive voyeuristic position. Share his nihlistic vision, if you dare. - SM

My Name is Rand by Wayne Courtois
Wayne Courtois delivers an Odyssey of extreme-bondage and tickle-torture sure to elicit gasps and groans in equal measure. My Name is Rand explores new sexual territory where men are bound and tickled to the point of madness, submitting completely to their master’s desires. This goes well beyond the typical S&M scenes you’ve become accustomed to; Wayne Courtois takes you on a strange and intensely erotic journey you’ve never yet imagined.

The narrator starts off exploring his unique fetish with a tickle-master met online, but is abducted before he can return home. He is removed to The Compound, a tickle-torture camp where people are literally tickled to death. He is run through a gauntlet of tickling and bondage that leaves him near madness, and then left to face the nemesis of Dred Junior, a psychotic who can mentally tickle you. The narrator stumbles upon a hiding place where other inmates are planning escape, and they take spiritual and sexual solace in one another.

Already becoming a cult classic among foot and tickle fetishists worldwide, My Name Is Rand is a powerful and delirious novel which will introduce you to a whole new world of sex play. Welcome to your new fetish. - SM
Read an Excerpt from My Name Is Rand
Read an Interview with Wayne Courtois

Where the Rainbow Ends by Jameson Currier
At the center of this epic tale is Robbie Taylor, who settles in New York City in 1978 as an optimistic, romantic young man with a circle of new friends. This powerful and passionate story of the trials and loves of a gay Everyman takes Robbie through a personal odyssey into enlightenment, spanning a period of almost fifteen years. As he navigates through the hedonism of his heady youth in Manhattan searching for faith, family, and understanding, Robbie is constantly being tested, like a modern-day Job. Currier masterfully weaves an ardent story about the families that we create for ourselves, a story that is at once lyrical, poignant, and sexy.
Read an Interview with Jameson Currier

The Big Book of Misunderstanding by Jim Gladstone
Gladstone's sweeping if muddled first novel certainly opens dramatically, as plucky, eccentric Joshua Royalton contemplates suicide, thinking, "Did I have to end my life to end my childhood?" As his attempt is squelched, so begins this prickly portrait of a boy's bittersweet Philadelphian upbringing. The largely "misunderstood" son of a restless mother and a controlling father, Joshua navigates the usual boyhood traumas, curing his persistent "outcast" status in grade school by participating in his town's dramatic production of Hello, Dolly!. Moving on to develop an impressive theatrical reputation in high school, he dates the lovely Meri and dreams about getting into Yale. Once admitted, he is ushered into an early adulthood comprising new friends, revelations about his sexuality (Meri is no longer part of the picture), and his parents' strangely smooth separation after 25 years of marriage.

Boulevard by Jim Grimsley
Arriving in your chosen city is one of the most important moments for a gay man, as it is for Newell, the naïve protagonist of Jim Grimsley's Boulevard. Before we become jaded, we have a year to saver everything that is new: music, bars, drugs, men and sex as we immerse ourselves in gay metropolis. Grimsley skillfully captures that moment of fear and awe as Newell joins New Orleans at the height of the 70's, sharing his love of the city and his new life with the reader. As the novel progresses, Newell becomes the canvas upon which the more experienced characters paint their desires, taking this bright young newbie down into the darker sexual arenas of New Orleans. Grimsley's distinctive voice guides us through this sensual city full of dark magical possibilities and haunting realities. - SM

The Lodger by Drew Gummerson
Honza takes in a lodger, Andy, who seems like his opposite - a coarse straight guy who comes home drunk every night to fart happily in front of the TV. But when, in a drunken stupor, Andy confesses to murder, Honza refuses to believe him. Then one weekend Andy disappears, only to return with his face rearranged. This black comedy of misunderstandings is a deft debut from Drew Gummerson.

Mysterious Skin by Scott Heim
At the age of eight Brian Lackey is found bleeding under the crawl space of his house, having endured something so traumatic that he cannot remember an entire five-hour period of time. During the following years he slowly records details from that night, but these fragments are not enough to explain what happened to him, and he begins to believe that he may have been a victim of an alien encounter. Neil McCormick is fully aware of the events from the summer. Wise beyond his years, curios about his developing sexuality, Neil found what he perceived to be love and guidance from his baseball coach. Now, ten years later, he is a teenage hustler, a terrorist of sorts, unaware of the dangerous path his life is taking. His recklessness is governed by idealized memories of his coach, that unexpectedly change when brian comes to Neil for help and, ultimately, the truth.

War Boy by Kief Hillsbery
Fleeing an abusive father, fourteen-year-old Radboy takes to the road with Jonnyboy, an older friend and mentor who is the only person Radboy believes he can trust. Five characters become fast allies, united by personal loss and by the allure of intimacy only friends in the throes of conflict can understand. When Jonnyboy drops out of sight, Radboy stays behind in San Francisco, where the underground world he has been introduced to inspires his own burgeoning sexual and emotional desires.

Flesh Wounds and Purple Flowers by Francisco Ibañez-Carrasco
An extravagant, tragicomic novel, Flesh Wounds & Purple Flowers takes us into the world of Latino machos and cha-cha divas of Santiago's gay underground, full of dreamers and schemers looking for salvation abroad. One of them is Camilo, a strong-willed queen who makes it out of Chile in the early '80s, but en route to New York lands in Vancouver, where he decides to stay. All the while he maintains contact with a starry network of machos and maricones in Chile, Cuba, and America: an exiled gringa with a mysterious past; a straight lover left behind in crumbling Havana; a transsexual confidante in Santiago. Told in the musical lilt of Spanglish, Camilo tells his story as he lays dying in his hospital bed, recalling a life of sequins, sex, disco, and a plague that is at the same time debilitating and liberating. - GW
Read an Interview with Francisco Ibañez-Carrasco

Killing Me Softly: Morir Amando by Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco
With his first novel, Flesh Wounds and Purple Flowers, Chilean-Canadian author Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco was heralded as a fearless writer-to-watch and short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Now comes Killing Me Softly: Morir Amando—twelve tales that rip the veils between the moral and the mundane, the prim and the grim, and rough trade—especially rough trade—and the men and women who love them too much and to no good end. Genre-blurring and gender-bending, these stories of love gone wrong cement Ibáñez-Carrasco’s reputation as one of Canada’s reigning bad boys of lit. Here is the Canada that lies in the shadow of the maple leaf: demented drag queens, mail order brides, illegal aliens from everywhere—even out-of-this-world shapeshifters, machos y maricones, gringos and grifters, homeless squeegee kids, sons stalking fathers, people living with AIDS, third-string academics, fallen hand models, the hideously burned and the easily forgotten.
Read an Interview with Francisco Ibañez-Carrasco

Family Dancing by David Leavitt
Tender, unsettling, and amusing, these stories present families all unhappy in their own different ways. A mother who presides over her local Parents of Lesbians and Gays chapter has trouble accepting her son's lover. A recently separated couple's compulsion to maintain a twenty-six-year tradition seems to magnify futility. The New York Times called this collection "astonishing - funny, eloquent, and wise."

Seven Sweet Things by Shaun Levin
The narrator and his lover, Martin, are two South Africans in London. An affair that begins in an internet chatroom takes them further into love than either imagined. Disturbingly honest and intensely erotic, Seven Sweet Things is as much an exploration of love as it is the lovers’ exploration of the city. Eking out a living by selling cakes and desserts, the narrator loves reading Plato, sitting on park benches, and feeding his beloved. Each meeting between them is framed by the making, or the promise of a sweet thing.
Read an excerpt from Seven Sweet Things.

The Haunted Hillbilly by Derek McCormack
A new title in Soft Skull's ShortLit series, The Haunted Hillbilly reads like both a vintage 1950s issue of Tales from the Crypt and a 21st-century re-imagining of Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. This historical first-person narrative is told by Nudie, "The Rodeo Tailor" (perhaps most famous for dressing Elvis Presley), a gay couturier who, in Derek McCormack's world, also happens to be a vampire. As the story evolves with its magical poetic cadence and minimalist style, Nudie makes and then breaks the career of Hank, a country-and-western singer at the Grand Ole Opry. Inspired by the real-life observations of country music promoter Oscar Davis, who saw it all and told it all in a series of tapes suppressed by the Country Music Foundation, The Haunted Hillbilly conjures the seamy queer underbelly beneath country music's sparkling, sequined surface.

The Concrete Sky by Marshall Moore
Marshall Moore's debut novel, The Concrete Sky, delivers a fast-paced mystery packed with unique cliffhangers reminiscent of Altman's The Player (without the cameos). Moore plays on the reader's expectations and forces you to double-back on your immediate suspicions, and often your second guesses, while driving you down a dark road at full speed with no headlights.

At 25, Chad Sobran's life couldn't get much worse: two mcjobs, insurmountable debt, tense relations with his dying mother and psychotic fag-bashing brother, and his friends in absentia—but when an accidental fall is labeled a suicide attempt by his intervening brother, things really begin to go south. Trapped in the psycho ward for 72 hours for observation, Chad hooks up with Jonathan, an underage but intelligent hottie who may or may not be responsible for the deaths of his parents and other inmates on the ward. On the outside, Chad is forced to attend to his dying mother who attempts to bribe him for a mercy killing. And his brother is pushing for a court hearing to have him officially committed to the state nut farm. He deflects this all with a snarky sense of intentional denial and drama that will either make you love him or hate him.

The story is sometimes bogged down by the character's monologues and continuous coverage of just how in debt Chad is, but Moore's fun plot twists with two boys on the lam make for an enjoyable read. A must have for the mystery lover. - SM
Read an excerpt from The Concrete Sky.
Rean an Interview with Marshall Moore.

At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie O'Neill
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.

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
There is a scene in Fight Club that sums up the thrust of this explosive novel—the nameless protagonist holds a gun to a kid's head and asks what he wants to do with his life instead of making just enough money to buy cheese and a TV, if he doesn't answer he dies. Living in a nihilistic society where your life needs to be threatened to feel alive, Fight Club takes us to a place beneath the surface, where we are broken down and bottom out before we can recreate ourselves better and stronger. The relationship between the POV and his mentor/nemesis, Tyler Durden, ranges from hero-worship to pure homoerotica. Palahniuk's first novel is a social commentary that gives the proletariat the upper-hand to change the world through planned acts of random violence. - SM

Calender Boy by Andy Quan
On the edge of adulthood, self-discovery, coming out; in university towns, Europe, Vancouver, Toronto, Sydney, the protagonists of the short stories in Calendar Boy unravel cultural heritage, community, identity on the road to—they hope—love, happiness and self-acceptance. Set around the globe, fifteen adventurous stories weave fictions with real-life smarts, guts and oomph underpinning them. In "How to Cook Chinese Rice," a recipe format—10 Percent called it "the gay Like Water for Chocolate"—yields insight into what it's like to be young, Asian and queer in Canadian society. "Higher Learning" pitches a hormone-fuelled, Vancouver-bred, first-year university student into the alternate universe of a small Ontario community. A love triangle of sorts anchors "Maintenance," a story heavy with the ache of jealousy and unrequited desire. Throughout, Quan shifts gears effortlessly from street-smart colloquial voice to rapid-fire monologue to the bemused, exhilarated tone of immigrants new to Canada or to gay male culture. With one foot in urban Canadian life and the other in the global village, Calendar Boy will hit home even as it makes you see the world in new ways.

City of Night by John Rechy
When John Rechy's explosive first novel--now a classic--appeared in 1963, it became a national best-seller and ushered in a new era of gay fiction. Bold and inventive in his account of the urban underworld of male prostitution, Rechy is equally unflinching in his portrayal of one hustling "youngman" and his search for self-knowledge within the neon-lit world of hustlers, drag queens, and men on every kind of make. As the narrator moves from El Paso to Times Square, from Pershing Square to the French Quarter, we get an unforgettable look at life on the edge.

The Long Blue Moan by L.M. Ross
The Long Blue Moan by L.M. Ross reads like an intense jazz session; each chapter is layered with the hot horns of man-on-man sex, the discordant harmony of the character's emotions, and driven by the percussion of their interweaving lives. The novel follows four gifted African-American men who are thrown together at The High School of Performing Arts. As a group they share a golden moment as a one-hit-wonder band, Da Elixir, but walk away from guaranteed success to follow their own dreams. As adults, their lives and relationships become increasingly complex as attmept to find their own Long Blue Moan, a wholeness that rivals Nirvana.

The foursome features Ty, the writer and self-appointed patriarch of the quartet, David, the über-queen dancer with fists full of attitude, Browney, the singer who makes all the wrong moves, and Face, the beautiful but emotionally distant actor. They cover the spectrum of human sexuality and drive, and each contains their own unique triumphs and flaws that make them come alive off the page.

The novel could have been subtitled, "Don't let nobody steal your joy," words to live by from Ty's gay uncle. The men struggle to be true to themselves, their talent and their friends, with varying degrees of success.

Though some moments of the plot border on melodrama, Ross' strong writing saves the story from going over the top. Marketed as an erotic epic, The Long Blue Moan is one hot and rewarding jam. - SM

Trio Sonata by Juliet Sarkessian
Janna is a attractive woman in her late twenties who appears to have everything, but something is missing from her life. She runs a successful café in central Philadelphia. Her boyfriend Winston is a faculty member at Curtis, a prestigious music school. He is intelligent, kind, and keen to marry her. There’s a little catch: she’s less interested in him than the young gay couple she has recently befriended. Philip and Alex are in their early twenties and have no place to be intimate; one night, after a few drinks, Janna offers to let them use her guest bedroom. This turns into a regular occurrence. One evening, Janna accidentally stumbles upon the two having sex… and stays to watch. This also turns into a regular occurrence, first without the boys’ knowledge and later, with it, quite openly. Winston falls by the wayside as Janna enters into a voyeuristic, triangular relationship with the two. All of their lives are irrevocably changed by the consequences of this unusual arrangement. Trio Sonata is fiercely erotic without devolving into pornographic vulgarity. Sarkessian, like other lesbian authors before her, such as Mary Renault, Marguerite Yourcenar and Patricia Nell Warren, examines human relationships through the lens of gay male sexuality, and never flinches from answering her own hard questions. She writes with keen insight and compassion, and this book is both subversive and elegant. In fact, the only thing wrong with it is that it’s not long enough. - Marshall Moore

Blood In My Hairspray by Steven Schreibman
Boys who love shtick will not be disappointed in Steven's Schreibman’s first novel, Blood in my Hairspray. A cross between film-noire and stand-up comedy, this over-the-top novel works hard to stay in your face with fabulousness and perfect hair.

Damien Shtup, a dramatic hairdresser who passes out more often than Edie Monsoon, caters to the local mafia wives in his Hell’s kitchen salon (furnished in immaculate white tile, sofa from Maurice Villency). His self-focused universe spirals out of control after the death of one of his clients; he suddenly receiving death threats and his stock of customized hairspray is tainted his horse blood. Is the mob out to get him, or his mother? Damien, with his loyal staff and customers behind him, rises to the occasion in perfect Mildred Pierce fashion.

Hunky gay cop, Edgar Ramirez, quickly takes control of his case and his heart as they team up to take on Damien's stalker. The two even attend a model mugging class, where models are taught how to fight back against prospective harassers, and take on the assailant in a high comedy car chase through the wilds of Manhattan.

Damien's outrageousness buoys the thin plot, much like a Bette Midler flick, and it's a fun summer read for you boys heading to the beach. - SM

One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other by D. Travers Scott
Quadruplet brothers. Raised in rural seclusion by their identical, namesake father. Now in their twenties, the Jake Barnes brothers are shocked by their father's sudden suicide during one boy's visit. More surprises come in the video he leaves behind, announcing that one of them is an unrelated outsider, and daring his sons to uncover the truth of their birth. From across the U.S. the brothers converge to find a woman who may be their mother, but twisted lust, murderous secrets, and shifting identities threaten their lives along the way. Suicide, homicide, fratricide, incest--it's a love story. And a page turner. With very dark humor. Hell, it's better than Cirque de Soleil. David Lynch meets Neil Bartlett? A Tennessee Williams-penned Twilight Zone episode with a Magnetic Fields soundtrack? Clive Barker meets Brazil meets Fight Club? David Cronenberg directs a queer Ordinary People?
Read an Excerpt from One Of These Things...
Read an Interview with D. Travers Scott

Pulling Taffy by Matt Bernstein Sycamore
The novel Pulling Taffy inhabits the boundaries between fiction, autobiography, and truth. It’s about choosing to remain dangerous and unrepentant, struggling to survive this ravaging world without losing a sense of integrity and charm. Moving from mid-nineties Boston, to post-grunge Seattle, to Giuliani’s New York, Pulling Taffy is about searching for home and not necessarily finding it.
Read an excerpt from Pulling Taffy.
Read an Interview with Matt Bernstein Sycamore.

Van Allen's Ecstacy by Jim Tushinski
Born into an extraordinarily talented family, 29-year-old Michael Van Allen is the son of a well-known concert pianist and an equally famous painter. All his life, he has yearned for the talent and creativity that should have been his birthright but have somehow been denied him. When he wakes up in a mental hospital, his memory gone, his former life erased, his doctor tells him of his screaming breakdown during one of his father’s performances. Van Allen's Ecstasy is the story of Michael's journey in search of his former self. As he pieces together his forgotten life, Michael uncovers jealousy, obsession, and secret desires that threaten to destroy his sanity once again. Nominated for the Violet Quill Award and Finalist for Ferro-Grumly Fiction Award.

Christ-Like by Emanuel Xavier
"When I was sixteen, my mother found out I was gay and threw me out. I ended up hustling at the piers of New York City. I attended balls with members of the legendary House scene. I dealt drugs at major nightclubs. Indeed, it was survival that became the consuming passion of my adolescent life. Christ-Like is about a West Side Highway hustler and drug dealer who survives the streets by joining the House of X, a gang of Godless gays that terrorize the underground club scene and ball circuit." - Emanuel Xavier

 

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