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TYPE: Fiction
Paperback
TITLE: American Studies
AUTHOR: Mark Merlis
PUBLISHER: Fourth Estate
BLURB: Reeve thinks his life is over. His career is at a dead end, his face
is a mess, and his landlord is evicting him from his apartment because he made
too much noise when a hustler beat him up. As he lies in his hospital bed, figuring
out what to do next, he finds himself brooding about the parallel ruin of his
old college mentor Tom Slater, a famous American literary scholar who was betrayed
and driven to suicide during the McCarthy era.
"A first novel of startling
maturity."
-Daily Telegraph
"Mark Merlis proves himself
an enviably accessible and assured new writer… If American Studies holds a mirror
up to our culture of discrimination, it is also a very funny book, which surprises
us with its sense of make-do hope."
-Sunday Times
"Bitterly funny and deeply
sad."
-Times Literary Supplement
"An exceptional first novel."
-Paul Bailey
"A brilliant first novel…
Merlis’s language is precise, discriminating and sensitive to irony."
-Literary Review
TYPE:
Fiction Paperback
TITLE: The Beautiful Room is Empty
AUTHOR: Edmund White
PUBLISHER: Vintage International
BLURB: When the narrator of Edmund White’s poised yet scalding autobiographical
novel first embarks on his sexual odyssey, it is the 1950s, and America is "a
big gray country of families on drowsy holiday." That country has no room
for a scholarly teenager with guilty but insatiable stirrings toward other men.
Yet even as he launches himself into the arena of homosexual eros, White’s protagonist
is also finding his way into the larger world.
Moving from a Midwestern college to the Stonewall Tavern on the night of the first gay uprising – and populated by eloquent queens, butch poseurs, and a fearfully incompetent shrink – The Beautiful Room Is Empty conflates the acts of coming out and coming of age. The result is a masterly picaresque, by turns furious, gleeful, and poetic, and bristling with epigrammatic wit on every page.
"Brilliant…scandalously outspoken
and harrowingly funny."
-Newsweek
"With intelligence, candour,
humour – and anger – White explores the most insidious aspect of oppression…
An impressive novel."
-Washington Post Book World
TYPE: Fiction
Paperback
TITLE: The Farewell Symphony
AUTHOR: Edmund White
PUBLISHER: Vintage
BLURB: The Farewell Symphony, named after the work by Haydn in which
the instrumentalists leave the stage one after another until just a single violin
is still playing, is the story of a gay man who has outlived most of his friends.
Starting in the late 1990s and coming up to the present day, the action of The Farewell Symphony takes place in New York, Rome and Paris and is as much about the Jamesian dilemma of the American in Europe as it is about braving the elements of love and loss. At its heart is the tale of a writer and his struggle to survive as he and his friends hammer out a new gay aesthetic, support themselves through odd jobs and fight for recognition. The narrator also allies himself with an older, richer and more established generation of gay men who are often uncomfortable with the sexual frankness of his prose – and of his nightly adventures. The novel brilliantly juxtaposes scenes of high cultural discussion among men of the Manhattan mandarinate with tough gritty scenes of backroom sex and sadomasochism.
Sublimely funny and wise, written in a language of extraordinary elegance and full of trenchant witty observations about sex and society, this is Edmund White’s greatest novel, a crowning achievement by one of the finest writers in the language.
"A work of singular accomplishment"
-Peter Kemp, Sunday Times
"The Farewell Symphony
unfolds nothing less than a secret history – of gay sexuality – from the late
1960s to the present, and plays out in the shadow of AIDS a forlornly moving
elegy to a generation… If White were judged simply on accomplishment and erudition,
he would lead the field. Yet what this novel reveals is a writer blessed with
a more elusive gift, and it should probably be called wisdom."
-Anthony Quinn, Daily Telegraph
"Always a writer of profound
psychological acuity, White takes on the grand themes of love and depth with
courageous mastery… The Farewell Symphony is a monumental achievement…
The book gives voice to a life of uncompromising individuation and reaches ad
depth of compassionate tolerance rare in any writer."
-Jeremy Reed, The Times
"A brilliant meta-novel,
a fertile questioning of some of the most prevalent assumptions about narrative,
personality, selfhood, fiction and literary form"
-Nicholas Jenkins, Times Literary Supplement
TYPE: Fiction
Anthology Paperback
TITLE: The Flamingo Anthology of Gay Literature: In Another Part of the Forest
EDITORS: Alberto Manguel and Craig Stephenson
PUBLISHER: Flamingo
BLURB: In this comprehensive anthology of short fiction exploring the theme
of male homosexuality, Alberto Manguel and Craig Stephenson have assembled a
rich gallery of visions drawn from across the glove. Forty-five superb stories,
written by both men and women, gay and non-gay, embrace the widest variety of
experience.
In these pages, the intricacies of adolescence and family love, AIDS and homophobia, politics and social relationships, sex and friendship, are illuminated by some of the twentieth-century’s greatest writers – among them Alice Munro, Yukio Mishima, Edmund White, John Cheever, Daphne du Maurier and James Baldwin. In their selection of authors, Manguel and Stephenson display both the unique nature of gay fiction and its universality.
With provocative and lively introductions to each story, In Another Part of the Forest is a stimulating collection for all readers of great fiction to enjoy.
"Alberto Manguel is an editor
both enthusiastic and meticulous, with a brilliant strong natural taste."
-Guardian
TYPE: Fiction
Paperback
TITLE: The Golden Gate
AUTHOR: Vikram Seth
PUBLISHER: Faber and Faber
BLURB: The Golden Gate is Vikram Seth’s brilliant and moving novel
in verse set in California’s Silicon Valley.
"This one will run and run."
-Angela Carter, New Society
"Vikram Seth’s extravaganza
is great, it makes frenetic fun… Seth is witty and fluent."
-Guardian
"Mr. Seth achieves a startline
flexibility of tone: grand set pieces, swift dialogue, light parody, comedy,
elegy."
-Martin Amis, Observer
"The satire stings, the rhymes
can stun;
So read The Golden Gate for fun."
-The Economist
"A breathtaking tour de force
of rhyme and reasonableness, The Golden Gate doesn’t only compellingly advocate
life’s pleasures; it stylishly contributes another one to them."
-Sunday Times
The Golden Gate was awarded the 1986 British Airways Commonwealth Poetry Prize.
TYPE: Fiction
Paperback
TITLE: Love and Death on Long Island
AUTHOR: Gilbert Adair
PUBLISHER: Vintage
BLURB:
"A latter-day and very English
reworking of the Death in Venice theme… it is a little gem of a book, beautifully
written and constructed, superbly characterised. What disturbs is the sheer
elegance of Adair’s prose style – most of us had probably long forgotten that
English could be written so well… A tour de force’
-Literary Review
"Quibbles vanish beside the
force of his slyly erotic and erudite prose in this beautifully executed literary
pastiche."
-Independent on Sunday
"[It] is in a direct line
from Lolita and (as the title implies) Death in Venice and comparisons with
Nabokov or Mann are not out of place. Brief, pure, intense, and almost ludicrously
desperate as all tales of impossible love must be… with perfect poise and poignance,
in a shimmering, cold prose. Adair puts across the impossibility of fulfilment,
the heat and humiliation of passion. The writing is masterly, the conjuring
of contrasting worlds a triumph"
-Isabel Quigly, Financial Times
"A concoction which is as
memorable as a night in the stalls of the human psyche ought to be"
-Tom Adair, Scotland on Sunday
TYPE: Fiction
Paperback
TITLE: Making History
AUTHOR: Stephen Fry
PUBLISHER: Arrow
BLURB: Michael Young is convinced his brilliant history thesis will win
him a doctorate, a pleasant academic post, a venerable academic publisher and
his beloved girlfriend, Jane.
A historian should know better than to think he can predict the future.
Leo Zuckerman is an ageing physicist obsessed with the darkest period in human history, utterly driven by his fanatical hatred of one man. A lover's childish revenge and the breaking of a rotten clasp cause the two men to meet in a blizzard of swirling pages. Pages of history. When they come together, nothing - past, present or future - will ever be the same again.
"His best novel yet... an
extravagant, deeply questioning work of science fiction"
-GQ
"A sci-fi comedy that is
also a time-travel thriller, constantly topical and always surprising... packed
with the author's personal enthusiasms and hatreds, the former red-hot and the
latter icy-black."
-Literary Review
"A powerful imaginative pull
that keeps the pages turning while the tea goes cold and the cat gets the goldfish."
-Independent
TYPE: Fiction
Paperback
TITLE: New Boy
AUTHOR: William Sutcliffe
PUBLISHER: Penguin
BLURB: ‘I didn’t get an erection or anything when I was looking at Barry.
I just… I just felt a certain manly admiration for his beauty. I think maybe
I was jealous of his power to attract women. The reason why I couldn’t stop
thinking about him or staring at him was that I wanted to look like him so that
I could have sex with lots of women. That’s what it was.’
"William Sutcliffe’s novel,
about the hormonal angst of a Jewish lad growing up in North West London’s bagel
belt, is all the more remarkable for being his first. The prose is as smooth
as good chopped liver, as spiky as properly pickled cucumber… Sutcliffe has
managed to pull off a worthy British counterpart to Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint"
-Jay Rayner in the Observer
"Well written, clever and
very funny"
-Benedict King in the Literary Review
"Smart, entertaining stuff…
somewhere between Adrian Mole and Holden Caulfield"
-Philip Hensher in the Mail on Sunday
"Very funny indeed"
-Ian Critchley in the Sunday Times