"Abramson's first in a series of books to come, this charming tale takes place in that shining homo beacon in the bay--San Francisco. Whether it's celebrating disco queernery, battling homophobia or getting over that pesky ex, this book's got you covered. And who ever said that protests were unflattering? Provocative yet short, its title says it all--only wait much longer and it may be more like Subway Reading." -- Brandon Aultman, HX Magazine, New York, NY
"Full of lively characters and wacky coincidence, this page-turning series aims to become the Tales of the City of the new millennium. In the popular imagination, the heyday of gay life is long gone, washed away by AIDS. But in this love song to San Francisco, Mark Abramson gives the lie to that myth, revealing the joy that still inheres to life in the City by the Bay. The quirky charm of San Francisco is alive and well, and living in the pages of Beach Reading."
--Lewis DeSimone, author of Chemistry
"The first volume in Mark Abramson's Beach Reading series pits a brokenhearted, barhopping Castro hero against a seething homophobe, set against the backdrop of a colossal dance party honoring 80s music legend Sylvester. Call it literary levity on overdrive, but it's also a sunny, campy, quick-witted gem, and a sheer delight.
Abramson, a Castro-area resident for 30-plus years, is among the newest local writers to emerge with books set in and about San Francisco. The storyline is a simple one. Tim Snow, a waiter and a regular fixture in Castro and South of Market bars, lives a semi-normal life in his beloved Upper Market abode, with the exception of getting stoned too often and attempting to circumnavigate his ex-boyfriend, who keeps popping up. The gay community is abuzz with anticipation for the star-studded Sylvester tribute party, but a nasty anti-gay organizer is planning a protest nearby that same night. Counterintelligence is carefully planned with Tim and Company, with a few subplot surprises thrown in.
Abramson knows well of what he writes. He migrated to San Francisco from Minnesota back in 1975, and enjoyed the friendship of John Preston, a former Advocate editor, as well as a livelihood comprised of bartending and dance-event producing. It was a completely different Castro back then, he says. "Everything was cheap: housing, food, drinks - and especially, all the thousands of horny young men like me."
In addition to the Beach Reading series, Abramson is also working on an epic memoir entitled Castro Street Diaries, which will be derived from his journal entries and memories of pre-AIDS San Francisco, true-life stories of both the sundown to sun-up celebrations and the tragic heartbreak of vanishing friends.
Forthcoming books in the series will focus on contemporary subjects such as gay marriage, the side effects of HIV anti-retroviral drugs, identity theft, and open relationships. But Abramson intends on keeping everything on the lighter side. 'In spite of touching on serious issues, I think it's very important to keep them fun to read as well. They're just beach reading, after all!'"
-- Jim Piechota, Bay Area Reporter
"I just finished reading Mark Abramson's 'Beach Reading' and the only word I can think of to describe it is 'WOW!' It's a short book - only 193 pages - and each of those pages is a pleasure... 'Beach Reading' is a 'love song to San Francisco' and I felt like singing along as I read it. It seems that city on the bay has been the center of gay life forever and after reading this you will understand why."
-- Amos Lassen, Eureka Pride
Beach Reading excerpt:
San Francisco dazzles most people who visit, but only some get trapped here. You might wonder if they’d turned their heads a moment sooner, like breaking their concentration away from the hypnotist’s swaying bauble just in time, they might be able to go back where they came from. Tim Snow could never leave, but he enjoyed being caught here. He almost felt normal in San Francisco. He had longed to be normal ever since he was a boy and started seeing things the way his grandmother did. Tim hoped from those early inklings that clairvoyance, like his first excitement around other boys at the swimming pool, was something that would just go away if he ignored it hard enough. His grandmother had called it a gift, but it wasn’t a present he’d asked for. Sometimes he tried to treat his unwanted psychic ability the way a handicapped person must learn to just get on with his life. So this is mostly Tim’s story...
"We don't have any," is the classic Indian response to homosexuality in India. Curiously, Indians say this even when they know of and tolerate homosexual acts in their communities. What's behind this seemingly contradictory stance? For the answer, we need to examine the social construct of sexuality in India.
As a boy in India, I often heard rumors of "buggering" being commonplace in elite boarding schools for boys. This was partly spoken of as a passing phase of rakishness and fun, the subtext being: they'll discover what real sex is when they grow up. In their lucid new book, The Indians, Sudhir and Katherina Kakar recount a story about Ashok Row Kavi, a well-known Indian gay activist. Apparently when Ashok was young and being pressured to marry by his family, especially by his aunt, he finally burst out that he liked to fuck men. "I don't care whether you fuck crocodiles or elephants," the aunt snapped back. "Why can't you marry?"
As in many other societies, procreation also underpins the Indian sense of social (and familial) order. Any threat to this social order is instinctively resisted, though the resistance takes many forms. In the Christian West, homosexual acts were persecuted as a sin against God (and less often, seen as a disease). Indians, on the other hand, denied the idea of homosexuality, while tolerating homosexual acts—a trick made possible by regarding these acts not as sex but as a kind of erotic fun, or masti. Sex is only what happens in the context of procreation, usually within marriage. Sex is what makes babies, and truly virile men, of course, produce male babies.
It is no surprise then, that the notion of a homosexual liaison as an equal alternate to a heterosexual one doesn't exist outside a small set of urban Indians; that would threaten the social order. Instead, the Indian response is: As long as men fulfill their traditional obligations to family and progeny, their homosexual acts are (uneasily) tolerated. Notably, according to the Kakars, the vast majority of even those who continue having sex with other men do not see themselves as homosexual. "Even effeminate men who have a strong desire to receive penetrative sex are likely to consider their role as husbands and fathers to be more important in their self-identification than their homosexual behavior." Lesbian activity is invariably seen as a response to sexually frustrating marriages (as also in Fire, the 1998 movie by Deepa Mehta).
While the Indian response reduces open conflict, the flip side is a muffled suffering: countless men and women lead double lives, hiding from their true natures and denying themselves the most precious of intimacies and self-knowledge. When I was young, one of my aunts filed for divorce just weeks into her marriage; an uncle told me in hushed tones that something was wrong with her husband's "manliness." My aunt was fortunate; far more often the marriage is for ever, and is even given full marks for a happy normalcy if a child is somehow produced.
Of course, every so often a homosexual couple openly flouts convention and declares their love for each other, as in the famous case of two policewomen in MP in the late 80s. Here a uniquely Indian solution has been to see it as "unfinished business" from a previous life, where the two were surely husband and wife, separated and united again by destiny. While this creative interpretation serves to fit "deviant behavior" in a traditional framework, it is not always invoked, resulting more often in disapproval and harassment.
A bit more tolerance of publicly "deviant behavior" does extend to the Hijras, not the least because their cultural status as "the third sex" has made them non-threatening (most are homosexual men who dress as women; some are eunuchs or have ambiguous genitalia) and imbued them with a special power to bless newlyweds and newborn males. Hindu gods and mythic heroes aid their acceptance too: Shiva at times assumes the female form; the goddess Yellamma has the power to change one's sex; Arjuna disguised himself as a eunuch during the Pandava exile.
In ancient India, according to the Kakars, homosexual activity "was ignored or stigmatized as inferior but never actively persecuted." While mild punishment is advocated by some books, "it was the homosexual and not homosexual activity that evoked society's scorn," with homosexuals seen as deficient and objects of "pity, dismay and revulsion" because of their inability to marry and father children, a sense that persists to this day. But the Kamasutra, which reflects elite attitudes of its day, even dwells on homosexual fellatio in sensual terms. Temples at Khajuraho and elsewhere openly depict homosexual acts.
Even after the arrival of Islam (the Qu'ran is hostile to homosexuality), Sufi mystics used homoerotic metaphors to describe their love of God and celebrated homoeroticism in poetry and literature of a "Persianized" Islam. Upper class Muslims got away with pederasty as long as they fulfilled—or pretended to fulfill—their obligations in marriage. It then fell upon the British to make things decidedly worse in the 19th century. The Kakars write:
It is the sodomy aspect of male homosexuality which the British colonial authorities, encased in a virulent, homophobic Victorian morality, latched on to in their draconian legislation of 1861. This law, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, states: "Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall be liable to a fine." The law, challenged in the courts by a gay organization and currently awaiting judgment in the Delhi high court, is still on the statute books. Although the law is rarely used to bring transgressors to court, it is regularly availed of by corrupt policemen to harass and blackmail homosexuals in public places.
The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community in India has made notable strides in urban milieus. Hundreds marched in Pride parades this year. But progress simply means progress has been made. Great disparities remain and attitudes in this deeply conservative country are slow to change.
Namit Arora is a travel photographer, prose writer, and Internet technologist. He has lived in four countries, visited dozens, and now divides his time between the San Francisco Bay Area and New Delhi. Over the years he has created what is perhaps the most extensive photojournal on India, focusing on portraits, wildlife, archeology, culture, and nature. His essays, fiction, and book reviews have appeared in several publications. He is currently at work on his first novel . www.shunya.net
Scott Shermanis the author of the clever new mystery novel First You Fall: A Kevin Connor Mystery, about a cute young gay hustler who becomes an amateur sleuth to discover who killed a friend in what the police believe is a suicide.
GayWired.com:Your protagonist, Kevin Conner, is a guy who gets paid for sexual services. Do you prefer the term male prostitute? Hustler?
Scott Sherman: Well, it really doesn't matter what I prefer—it's up to Kevin what he wants to be called. He couldn't care less, as long as he gets paid. Unfortunately, his favorite appellation, "rent boy," isn't really popular here in the States.
GW:Where did you get the idea for a mystery novel in which the amateur sleuth is a gay hustler?
SS: I wanted a protagonist whose work would bring him into contact with all kinds of people—and Kevin's customers are certainly a varied lot! I also wanted the book to be romantic and sexy. Kevin has many suitors in the book, some of whom are clients, some who are not. Kevin's job gave me a lot of chances to write about sex—although, often, in a humorous way. Like most of my encounters in my twenties, a lot of Kevin's sex scenes are played for laughs.More of interview @ Book Club: Gay Hustler Mystery 'First You Fall'
Andrew Davidson's 'The Gargoyle' more entertainment than serious novel
The gargoyle is a "coke-addled pornographer" burned when he crashes his car over an embankment while high and drunk, paranoid that fiends are aiming arrows at him. He doesn't have a name, he lives in no identified place, but for nearly 500 pages, he is our narrator, describing himself with grisly gusto as a "Kentucky Fried Human" and "a blister of a human being."
"The Gargoyle" is also a much-anticipated first novel, featured before its publication in The Wall Street Journal, sold at auction to Doubleday for $1.25 million, with rights put up for bid in 26 other countries.
Writer Andrew Davidson hails from Manitoba, and noodled for years over the manuscript, corresponding with a burn victim via the Internet, looking up facts about monasteries and burn treatments and medieval German mysticism, reading a translation of Dante's "The Divine Comedy."
The result is as sloppy and extravagant as a toddler's kiss. Some readers, no doubt, will be in the mood.
The story opens with an amped-up description of the car wreck, whipsawing in tone from sadistic to playful, striking that bellicose note hit by "Fight Club." We learn that our narrator spilled bourbon in his lap just before his car crunched past the rails. The booze acted as an accelerant in the blaze, the driver's penis became a wick, and it burned away -- a plot point to which he returns us again and again.
One reason for that is that his appendage was a marquee feature in porn flicks, before our clever storyteller figured out the real money was in producing. Another reason is Marianne Engle, a patient from the psych ward who wanders into the burn unit on page 50 to declare that she and the narrator were once nun and mercenary in love in the 12th century.
Since My Last Confession: a witty and probing account of his struggle with his faith in the context of the same-sex marriage fight in Massachusetts
Boston's St. Anthony Shrine is not your typical Catholic experience. Scott Pomfret, a gay porn writer and SEC attorney who is a lay lector there, writes of when a blue-haired lady approached a Franciscan friar before Mass and pointed to the announcement for the Gay and Lesbian Spirituality Group in the weekly bulletin. She asked angrily, ''What's next? You going to have a support group for prostitutes?'' The friar replied, ''Why? Did you want to join?''
Since My Last Confession is Pomfret's witty and probing account of his struggle with his faith in the context of the same-sex marriage fight in Massachusetts. He attempts to confront Cardinal Seán O'Malley over anti-gay dogma that includes a declaration that Rome's opposition to adoptions by gay couples cannot be disputed.
Along the way he encounters the organization Roman Catholic Womanpriests; O'Malley's motto, ''Quodcumque Dixerit Facite'' (Do Whatever He Tells You); the macabre reverence within the Church for relics of the saints; and a politically correct Dignity service in an Episcopal church basement. ''Before approaching the sacred sawhorse for our consecrated pitas,'' Pomfret writes of the service, ''the Marist reminded us that there was a gluten-free 'host alternative' as well as consecrated grape juice for those with 'special needs.'''
Pomfret provides sidebars explaining everything from Catholic vocabulary to clerical garb to excommunication to Butler's Lives of the Saints. He also lists clues as to whether Cardinal O'Malley is or is not gay (he calls it a draw), and gives a short history refuting the claim by the Massachusetts Catholic Conference that marriage has remained unchanged for millennia as a union between one man and one woman.
Mentioning that he and his partner commit what the 1878 Baltimore Catechism calls one of ''the Four Sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance,'' Pomfret notes that putting consensual sodomy on a par with willful murder is ''a tad extreme.'' He points out that the Vatican's chief exorcist in 2002 called the Harry Potter books ''satanic,'' and observes dryly, ''Nice to know the Vatican was holding high-level consultations about protecting children from fictional characters while subjecting the same children to predatory priests.'' Irreverence here is not just a way of dealing with pain, but a tool for eliciting the truth.
The book is filled with vivid observations, as when describing a spirituality group member whose ''legs trailed away from his upper body like a nasturtium spilling over an iron railing.'' Pomfret can be unexpectedly moving: ''An old woman in the second row skipped a whole decade of her rosary, raised her face to the altar, and revealed that she had once been very beautiful.'' See Have Faith
Paul Burston is a journalist and writer. His first novel, Shameless, was described by Will Self as "the sharp truth about gay London" and is now available in paperback.
1. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891) Wilde is often credited with having invented modern homosexuality and, in Dorian Gray, he created an archetype - the beautiful young man who sells his soul in exchange for perpetual youth. This book should be required reading for the boys of Old Compton Street.
2. Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet (1943) For many gay men, Genet represents a self-loathing homosexuality that went out of fashion with the birth of gay liberation. He was certainly a pessimist, and one who would have had little sympathy with the feelgood, flag-waving gay politics of today. Our Lady of the Flowers is considered his masterpiece. Genet wrote it in prison, on pieces of brown paper used by the prisoners to make bags. When the papers were confiscated, he started again. So in that sense at least, there is an extraordinary optimism about it.
3. City of Night (Rechy, John) by John Rechy (1963) I was first switched on to John Rechy by listening to Soft Cell and Marc Almond. Rechy's is a world populated by hustlers, drag queens and men on the make, masking their longing for love with bitchy humour and casual sex. He's actually a far funnier writer than many people give him credit for. This was his first novel.
4. Tales of the City: A Novel (P.S.) by Armistead Maupin (1978) I must have read the Tales of the City series about a dozen times. Maupin was the first writer I ever read who presented gay characters as part of life's rich tapestry, rather than as creatures inhabiting a world all of their own. It's the happy mix of gay and straight characters that makes him so readable. The plots are often stretched beyond credibility, but the characters are so convincing that it hardly matters.
5. Dancer from the Dance: A Novel by Andrew Holleran (1978) Set against the smoke-filled dives and gay discos of 70s New York, Dancer From The Dance is a tale of doomed queens, professional faggots and the loneliness of lives lived out under the revolving glitter ball. There's an almost mythical quality to the story, as the various characters are enraptured by the arrival of Malone, a man whose physical beauty marks him out as some kind of saviour. A gay literary classic, and rightly so.
6. A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White (1982) Someone described this book as a cross between Catcher in the Rye and De Profundis. I'm not a huge fan of Edmund White generally (I find him rather pompous). Nor do I particularly like 'coming out' stories. But this book is a true original.
7. Queensby Pickles (1984) Queens was published the same year I moved to London. Lambasted by the gay press for its allegedly 'negative' portrayal of London's gay community, it's a far more honest account of gay life in the big city than you'll ever read in any of the gay bar rags. For some strange reason, certain gay men seem to have a problem laughing at themselves. The writer of this book clearly doesn't.
8. Flesh and Blood: A Novel by Michael Cunningham (1995) Michael Cunningham is one of the most gifted writers around. His last book, The Hours, won the Pulitzer prize for fiction and is currently being made into a film starring Nicole Kidman. This is his second novel. It tells the story of four generations of an American immigrant family and the various ways in which the parents cope with a gay child in the family and the gay child copes with the desire to create a family of his own. It's an ambitious book, epic in scale, and one which reminds us that rightwing fundamentalists aren't the only ones concerned with 'family values'.
9. Loadedby Christos Tsiolkas (1997) The tale of a screwed-up, 19-year-old Greek gay lad who goes looking for kicks in suburban Melbourne, this is the kind of novel that you read in one or two sittings. Barely 150 pages long, and written in stark prose, it's a complete head rush from start to finish, packed with tales of anonymous sex, drug abuse and the harsh realities of life on the edge.
10. Two Gentlemen Sharing by William Corlett (1997) Two Gentlemen Sharing is one of the funniest gay novels I've read in years. A comedy of manners set in a quiet village in middle England, it revolves around a cast of colourful country types whose tolerance is tested by the arrival of two gay men setting up home together. Corlett handles the clash of different lifestyles perfectly, using gentle humour to explore personal prejudices, and offering plenty of surprises along the way.
Marriage and parenthood: A talk with Nancy Polikoff
For many same-sex couples, one of the primary motivations for getting married is to gain legal protections for our children. Nancy Polikoff, professor of law at American University Washington College of Law, cautions us, however, that we should not tie parenthood and marriage too tightly. "For the last 40 years," she says, "the development of the law has been to equalize the status of children born to married and unmarried parents ... . We were able to make enormous gains on behalf of same-sex parents and their children in that context, without marriage on the radar screen at all."
While marriage should be an option for all, she believes, it should not be a requirement. Opposite-sex couples have their parental status protected whether or not they are married, she notes, and by and large their children turn out fine. Research has shown, too, that children of same-sex couples have also been doing well with unmarried parents. "That's what we say in every custody case, that's what we say every time somebody says we shouldn't be able to adopt children."
In Polikoff's Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage: Valuing All Families under the Law (Beacon: 2008), she further explores why marriage is not sufficient and should not be necessary to protect all families. She admits that the book is "somewhat unusual" for her in that it focuses on couples and adult relationships and discusses parenting only as a subset of that.
She has spent most of her 30-year career, however, on issues specific to lesbian and gay parents and their children. In her last year of undergraduate work, 1972, she met the first person identified to her as a lesbian mother. The woman had just lost custody of her children after coming out and divorcing her husband. When Polikoff entered law school, her first law review article (published with Nan Hunter) was about lesbian mothers in custody cases. Her interest in the topic has never wavered, she says, although she has worked on other issues. Becoming a mother herself and watching many of her friends and colleagues doing the same has reinforced her commitment.
Pioneer into secret black gay lifestyle goes straight in latest novel
Best selling writer E. Lynn Harris can still remember the first time he realized he was poor.
His family had been invited to the housewarming of a well-to-do family in his hometown of Fayetteville, Ark., and Harris, then a young boy fresh from an afternoon of playing outside, was sitting in the living room when another guest remarked on his appearance. For much of the visit, he tried desperately to tuck his bare, dusty feet underneath the sofa.
It was those childhood memories that helped motivate his success in later years.
"I didn't grow up in the kind of environment that my characters grew up in, or the kind of environment that I live in now," the 52-year-old author says. "It was one of the things that I always aspired to."
His fame has made him a part of a more privileged world, and his success can be partly attributed to showing his readers a world with which they were previously unfamiliar: the secret world of professional, bisexual black men living as heterosexuals.
This week, Harris is back after a two-year hiatus with his 10th novel, "Just Too Good to Be True." In some ways, the book returns to some of his typical themes — family, relationships, fame — but Harris also takes on new territory, focusing for the first time on a straight relationship.
His writing falls into several genres, including gay and lesbian fiction, African American fiction, urban fiction, and so on. And with 4 million copies in print, the books are also best sellers. Pioneer into secret black gay lifestyle goes straight in latest novel Hartford Courant, United States
Anti-Gay Challenge Issued to Kids’ Book About Marriage Equality in ...
The blog of a Colorado librarian documents the first challenge to a children's book about a gay wedding, and predicts, "I suspect the book will get a lot of challenges in 2008-2009."
In anticipation of future attacks on the book, the librarian, Jamie S. LaRue, adds in the July 14 posting to his blog, called Myliblog, "So I offer my response, purging the patron's name, for other librarians."
LaRue posted his long, thoughtful letter to the woman who wrote to challenge the inclusion of the book, Uncle Bobby's Wedding, by Sarah S. Brannen. The letter is consistently respectful in tone, but doesn't back down from stating LaRue's points: children's books are meant to address all sorts of things, including adult issues, everything from terrifying or sad topics like alcoholic parents, divorce, and death, to happier (but controversial) topics like marriage between two devoted people of the same gender. Anti-Gay Challenge Issued to Kids' Book About Marriage Equality in ... EDGE Boston -
Praised for his 'perfumed, dandified style', Andrew Sean Greer is one of America's finest young writers. He tells Stuart Jeffries about the family secret that inspired his latest novel, The Story of a Marriage
A long time ago in Kentucky, a man took Andrew Sean Greer's grandmother for a drive. The man, a family friend, told her something she didn't want to hear. During the war he and her husband had been lovers.
How did she react, I ask Greer. "She just said to him: 'Get the hell out of here.'" Greer sits back in his seat. We're chatting in his publisher's offices in Bloomsbury. I lean forward, thinking Greer will continue the story. I'm expecting (this being the American south of the 1950s) passion, ruin, shame, marital recrimination, probably divorce, possibly the husband being named and shamed for his sexual orientation in the local newspaper.
But no. That's the end of the story. "My grandmother was not a great storyteller," says Greer. Didn't she confront her husband? "They never talked about it. That wasn't the era of psychoanalysis when everybody tells everybody everything and where there is a presumption that confession and confronting difficult personal issues is good for a relationship." Do you know if your grandfather was gay? "Well, he did spend a lot of time cleaning his shoes and looking after his appearance. I knew him until I was about 13. He was this guy in a chair." You never asked him? "I never did."
These are not small matters. His grandmother's sliver of a tale sparked Greer's latest novel, The Story of a Marriage. Like Greer's 2004 novel The Confessions of Max Tivoli, his new book comes to Britain with rave reviews. According to the New York Times: "Greer's considerable gifts as a storyteller ascend to the heights of masters like Marilynne Robinson and William Trevor." Whatever Greer inherited from his grandmother, it wasn't her shortcomings as a narrator. Greer is only 37 and John Updike has already compared him to Proust and Nabokov for his "perfumed, dandified style of disenchantment". He's a monster of precocity, with a (sickeningly well-founded) confidence in his talent scarcely imaginable among his transatlantic peers.
In the book, the eerie domestic calm of Pearlie Cook's marriage to her husband Holland in early 1950s San Francisco is disturbed by an elegantly dressed gentleman caller named Buzz. He has come not just to tell Pearlie that he and Holland were together during the war (he never, Pearlie notes, uses the word "lovers"), but also that he has "a proposal". It's not quite an indecent one, but it's pretty wild. He will give her $100,000 if she agrees to allow him to take her husband away, probably to New York, where a gay couple might just find a sympathetic corner to build a life together. She will be able to raise her boy Sonny in unimagined luxury, and spare him the shame of it becoming known that his daddy is homosexual. How can she refuse?
"In 1953, when the story is set, women did make sacrifices of this kind: she would have wanted to protect her son. Dad being exposed as gay would have been another mark against her son. It still goes on, that kind of naming and shaming of gay people," says Greer. Not, surely, in San Francisco? "No, but when I was living in Montana 10 years ago, they were trying to pass a law to put lesbians and gay men on the sex-offenders register." No! "Oh yes," says Greer. "My country is nothing if not diverse."
Science fiction writer and poet Thomas Disch has committed suicide. Disch died July 4 and his body was discovered July 5, according to the New York City Police Department. He was 68.
The author of popular sci-fi novels Camp Concentration and 334, Disch had been openly gay since 1968. Following the 2004 death of his partner, poet Charles Naylor, Disch reportedly began suffering from depression.
Awarded many honors for his fiction, including two O. Henry awards, the genre-bending Disch also published more than a half dozen books of poetry, a whimsical Child's Garden of Grammar (1997); a history of speculative fiction, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of (1998); and the Brave Little Toaster series for children.
Random House To Publish Fictional Laura Bush Book With Abortions, Lesbians & Presidential Sex
Curtis Sittenfeld, the bestselling author of Prep and The Man of my Dreams, has penned a fictionalized account of Laura Bush's life to be released in time for the Republican National Convention.
The book, American Wife, will be published by Random House, and centers around a main character named Alice Blackwell, a librarian who unwittingly falls in love with a blue-blooded man (Charlie Blackwell) who would become President of the United States.
It is, in short, a fictional examination of the life of the First Lady that mingles real facts and incidents with the author's imaginative, fanciful, sometimes sexually charged musings. The result is a masterful highbrow-lowbrow mash-up that satisfies as ass-kicking literary fiction and juicy gossip simultaneously.
From discovering that her grandmother is a lesbian, killing her high school crush with her car at age 16 (this incident at least is based in fact--Laura Bush was involved in a fatal car accident at that age), having sex with his brother, getting an abortion, and descriptions of sex with the president, Alice's antics are sure to have tongues chattering from coast to coast.
Liberal Anglicans are the true church, new book claims
A new book just published leads the fight against the ‘conservative’ attempt to take over the Church of England and the Anglican Communion.
Liberal Faith in a Divided Church by Jonathan Clatworthy, General Secretary of the Modern Churchpeople’s Union, argues that the Church has traditionally been tolerant and inclusive, willing to embrace differences of opinion and allow them to be debated without threats of schism.
At this time of increasing controversy between liberals and conservatives in the western churches, and especially in view of the July 2008 Lambeth Conference, this book is a highly topical contribution to the case for Christian liberalism and is certain to stir controversy.
While observing the current disputes, especially over women and homosexuality, it is a work of scholarship which examines why Christians understand their faith in such radically different ways, and proposes a way forward which would enable them to worship together and respect diversity of opinion.
The catalyst is the row over the consecration of a gay bishop in America, but Clatworthy argues that it goes deeper than that, to the very roots of Anglicanism itself. Different theories developed at different stages to produce the mix of ideas we have today. The Reformation, the Enlightenment, the nineteenth century revivals and fundamentalism all produced their own ideas about the authority of the Bible, reason, the Church and individual experience. Clatworthy believes that classical Anglican theology is by definition liberal. It affirms tradition but is open to new insights and humble enough to accept that our knowledge can never be complete or certain. The Church should be inclusive, welcoming, and open to debate, allowing differences of opinion to continue until consensus is reached. Conservative Christians see it differently; this book explains why the two views may well be irreconcilable.
This book offers a strong defence of the liberal tradition within Christianity. In particular it highlights the importance that classic Anglicanism has always given to balancing the claims of Scripture, Tradition and Reason and hence to accepting the inevitability of diversity within a single Church. Clatworthy shows very clearly what is at stake in today’s debate within the Anglican communion and how tragic it would be if a fundamentalist uniformity were to triumph over a reasoned diversity Professor Paul Badham, Department of Theology, University of Wales, Lampeter
For a long time, liberals in the Church of England have been exposed to jibes that they offer a watered-down version of Christianity and have trimmed their sails according to the prevailing winds of secularism. This kind of name-calling leaves many naturally liberal Churchpeople feeling bruised, defensive, and uncertain as to whether they are really representing historic Christian teaching. Now there are signs of a fight-back. Jonathan Clatworthy’s book is one manifestation of this. Clearly written, with a firm grounding in the historical and intellectual background of contemporary debates, and plenty of common sense, he argues for the properly theological truth of liberalism. This work will encourage many to move from the defensive to speak out all the more strongly for the rightness as well as the humaneness of a liberal approach. George Pattison, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, University of Oxford
The Modern Churchpeople’s Union promotes liberal theology within the church. The MCU’s annual conference is to be held next week from 8th to 11th July and among its speakers are Gene Robinson, the gay American bishop, Frank Griswold, formerly Presiding Bishop of the church in the USA, and Trevor Mwamba, Bishop of Botswana and a leading voice in the African church.
Summer is wedding season. It seems especially so this year with the flurry of newly legal same-sex marriages.
Here's a timely picture book that adds to ever-growing diversity in today's children literature.
"Uncle Bobby's Wedding," by Sarah S. Brannen, is the tale of a girl and her favorite uncle.
Uncle Bobby takes Chloe for walks, for rowboat rides on the river and teaches her about the stars.
Life is good until the day Mama throws a family picnic and Uncle Bobby announces that he and his friend Jamie are getting married. Everyone is excited except Chloe.
She tells her mother, "Bobby is my special uncle. I don't want him to get married."
Victor Martin has been writing since he was a child, but he didn't realize it could be a career until he became a convict.
A few years ago, Martin became a published author, writing four novels while lying in his bunk in a state prison in Elizabeth City. His books, which feature a high-rolling criminal named Unique, have a following among readers of what is known as "urban fiction," a popular literary genre characterized by explicit tales of inner-city crime life. Martin's books are available on Amazon.com.
But Martin says prison officials are shutting him down, saying his novels violate a policy that bars inmates from conducting business behind bars.
Martin, a 32-year-old habitual felon with several theft-related convictions, says the policy violates his right to free speech. Martin's attorneys are challenging the policy, which they say prison officials have used to confiscate Martin's manuscripts and discipline him for writing.
"When I'm trying to do something positive, they want me to stop," Martin said in a telephone interview from the Elizabeth City prison. "The way I see it, they want me to stay stagnant and not do anything."
Martin's current publisher, Marcenia Waters of Charlotte, says Martin plays a small role in business affairs related to publishing. Her self-owned publishing company makes the arrangements for printing and distribution and handles the income from Martin's latest book, "Unique's Ending."
Waters said she became a fan of Martin's writing after hearing about him through word of mouth. She wrote to him in prison, and they developed a relationship through letters. Eventually, she offered to publish one of his books.
Burr, in the closet during TV career, comes to life in new book
The longtime partner of Raymond Burr says he has not seen the new book out on the late actor but is planning on writing his own tome about his life with Burr.
Robert Benevides, 78, told the Bay Area Reporter that he is working with a writer to tell the story of his 33-year relationship with the TV legend.
"[Burr's] relatives have died off, so I'm not concerned about offending them," Benevides said.
Burr, best known for his role as TV's Perry Mason, died with Benevides at his side in 1993 in the home the couple shared in Healdsburg, in Sonoma County's wine country. Burr was once TV's highest paid actor and through syndication, continues to be one of the most recognizable celebrities in the world.
Craig Seymour is exposed, past and present. As a University of Maryland graduate student, the metro Washington native entered the world of Southeast D.C.'s male-stripper venues. The premise was academic, at first interviewing patrons and strippers for the sake of his thesis. Moving on to doctoral work in American studies, he took things a step further, becoming a stripper himself.
Today, Seymour stands further exposed, this time in print, with the release of All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, D.C. It's a somewhat ballsy move for an academic, soon to relocate from his post at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth to a spot teaching journalism at Northern Illinois University. But if such a memoir -- replete with cum shots, hand jobs and crotch biting -- caused him any fear, it was all the more reason to do it. Conquering fear, after all, went hand in hand with entertaining his clients in nothing but socks and a smile.
''It really goes back to the message of the book, where I write about continually taking risks,'' says Seymour, who has spent the last few years making the half-hour commute to UMass from Providence, R.I., in part because of what he says is a fantastic culture of male-strip bars in that city. ''As much as I like Providence, this was a great opportunity and I owed it to myself to take that other risk, to see what more might be out there for me.
''That's why it's really important. I'm leaving all my friends. I'm leaving this great place. But I felt it was something I had to do, or else I wasn't even living up to the message of my own book.''
That message, learned in large part in Southeast, has not only helped Seymour in academia, but as a music journalist at Vibe, Entertainment Weekly and elsewhere, finding ways to get Mariah Carey, Luther Vandross and Janet Jackson to reveal themselves. Seymour also likely gleaned some of the message from his teenaged friendship with another local, Matt Drudge, remembered by Seymour for his laser-like focus. More of this review @ Metro Weekley.
I felt that I'd made a transformation as surely as Superman slipping out of a phone booth or Wonder Woman doing a sunburst spin. I was bare-ass in a room of paying strangers, a stripper. After years of wondering what it would be like, I had done it -- faced a fear, defied expectation, embraced a taboo self. It was only the beginning....
All I Could Bare is the story of a mild-mannered graduate student who "took the road less clothed" -- a decision that was life changing. Seymour embarked on his journey in the 1990s, when Washington, D.C.'s gay club scene was notoriously no-holds-barred, all the while trying to keep his newfound vocation a secret from his parents and maintain a relation-ship with his boyfriend, Seth. Along the way he met some unforgettable characters -- the fifty-year-old divorcé who's obsessed with a twenty-one-year-old dancer, the celebrated drag diva who hailed from a small town in rural Virginia, and the many straight guys who were "gay for pay." Seymour gives us both the highs (money, adoration, camaraderie) and the lows (an ill-fated attempt at prostitution, a humiliating porn audition).
Ultimately coming clean about his secret identity, Seymour breaks through taboos and makes his way from booty-baring stripper to Ph.D.-bearing academic, taking a detour into celebrity journalism and memorably crossing paths with Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey, and Mary J. Blige along the way. Hilarious, insight-ful, and touching, All I Could Bare proves that sometimes the "wrong decision" can lead to the right place.
Electronic books have been available in some form for a couple of decades, but the 7-month-old Amazon Kindle is flashing the publishing industry its clearest peek at the future of reading - even if analysts say the much-hyped e-reading device won't immediately upend the text business as the iPod has recently transformed the music world.
The 10-ounce Kindle, which holds 200 e-books and can also tirelessly download daily editions of 19 newspapers and 346 blogs, is fielding pretty heady praise for a device few have seen. Amazon hasn't released sales figures, which makes skeptics wonder about its market penetration. New York tech blog Silicon Alley Insider recently posted a photo of a subway rider holding a Kindle under the headline: "Found! A Real Amazon Kindle User."
"We were talking about (the Kindle's low public visibility) at the office the other day. Who's really seen one out there?" said Steve Weinstein, an analyst who tracks Amazon and other Internet commerce sites for Portland's Pacific Crest.
Nevertheless, Weinstein predicted that Amazon's global e-book sales could hit $2.5 billion by 2012. He estimates that the company sold 40,000 units a month this year at its original price of $399 (the price was recently reduced to $359, including wireless charges) and could sell between 700,000 and 800,000 by the end of 2008.
"I don't expect it to have the same impact on the industry as the iPod had on the music industry," Weinstein said.
Greener, easy to use
While the Kindle might not be at the center of a culturally transforming technology moment like the iPod, Weinstein said, "It could be at the very beginning of one."
So if the Kindle is not the publishing world's version of the internal combustion engine, perhaps it is more like its Prius: a greener, easy-to-use device that heralds the industry's future.
But the paperback-book-size gadget, which comes in a black leather carrying case, is still too expensive for the mainstream market, analysts say.
David Kaufman has now written the long-awaited, definitive biography of Doris Day. By telling Day’s incredible, previously untold story, Kaufman takes the reader to the epicenter of American popular culture— a roller-coaster saga, from the 1940s to the 1980s. While Day symbolized virtuous America to the rest of the world—especially in her heyday, the 1950s and early 1960s—both she and that era are still perceived as being far more innocent and carefree than they really were. Indeed, what makes Day’s story so richly fascinating is the fact that she was in many ways the opposite of her image as “the girl next door.” She was also a real-life Cinderella who regretted having gone to the ball and who found a series of princes who proved far less than charming.
Thanks to Kaufman’s dogged diligence in tracking down countless colleagues and intimates, he gives us:
Scintillating tales of fame, beauty, money, tragedy, sexual ambiguity, and sexual conquests.
Anecdotes about a vast array of major subsidiary players in Day’s life, including Ronald Reagan, Frank Sinatra, Alfred Hitchcock, Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, Charles Manson, Mickey Mantle, Candice Bergen, and Rock Hudson.
Kaufman reveals Day’s demons while emphasizing the extraordinary credit she deserves as an artist. In the tradition of great biographies, Kaufman’s detailed work not only reveals the surprising story of one of America’s most beloved icons, but also compels us to rush back and see her best films—including The Man Who Knew Too Much, Pillow Talk, Love Me or Leave Me—and to listen to her unforgettable songs—“Sentimental Journey,” “Secret Love,” “Que Sera, Sera.” Though she made more than 550 recordings and starred in 39 movies—not to mention her own TV show for five years—the epic story of Doris Day’s life has never been told . . . until now.
"Aside from her as-told-to autobiography with A.E. Hotchner in 1975, this is the first full-length biography devoted to Doris Mary Anne von Kappelhoff, who was rechristened Doris Day just before she began fronting for the Les Brown Band in 1940. Although Day was continually portrayed in magazines and onscreen as a contented wife and mother, Kaufman (Ridiculous!: The Theatrical Life and Times of Charles Ludlam)—who spent eight years interviewing more than 150 people to create this definitive biography—uncovers a tireless workaholic (from 1947 to 1968, she made 39 films and recorded more than 600 songs) with four failed marriages and a son (music producer Terry Melcher) who was "more of a brother or father-figure than a son to his mother." Kaufman also uncovers that she was born in 1922, making her two years older than reference works state. Mismanaged by her third husband (their 16-year marriage was "a business arrangement" by their fifth anniversary), her career (and legacy) was severely damaged by the last seven films she made over a three-year period. This is an eye-opening, fair-minded bio of a woman who brought a lot of joy to fans but has found very little herself." Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Although Doris Day is still the number one box office star of all time, history has not taken her accomplishments very seriously, and little is known about her life after retirement—until now. Kaufman's definitive biography is highly recommended.... Delivering on his subtitle's 'untold story' phrasing, (Kaufman) uncovers juicy details of Day's nervous breakdown; her relationships, which belied her girl-next-door image; her reclusive life after retirement; and her little-known fourth marriage. Kaufman had unparalleled access to Day's friends and family, especially her son, Terry Melcher, who also discus
