Jailbait and Other Stories


Book Description

The ten stories in Brad Gooch's first book of prose are as contemporary as an overheard phone call. Don't expect complicated plots, in-depth conversations, moments of acute psychological analysis. Instead the author gives us a voyeuristic look at some tough people caught in private (slightly embarrassing) moments. Seen as if through the windows of an apartment building. Speaking the pared-down dialogue of a TV show or movie. Gooch's style--spare, hesitant, factual, sensual, polished--allows the primitive storytelling back in; we feel the propelling undertow of his characters' desires and impulses. Jailbait and Other Stories is unquestionably a text of an for the Eighties.




The Middleman


Book Description

A National Book Critics Circle Award winner and New York Times Notable Book: “intelligent, versatile . . . profound” stories of migration in America (The Washington Post Book World). Illuminating a new world of people in migration that has transformed the essence of America, these collected stories are a dazzling display of the vision of this critically-acclaimed contemporary writer. An aristocratic Filipina negotiates a new life for herself with an Atlanta investment banker. A Vietnam vet returns to Florida, a place now more foreign than the Asia of his war experience. An Indian widow tries to explain her culture’s traditions of grieving to her well-intentioned friends. And in the title story, an Iraqi Jew whose travels have ended in Queens suddenly finds himself an unwitting guerrilla in a South American jungle. Passionate, comic, violent, and tender, these stories draw us into a cultural fusion in the midst of its birth pangs, expressing a “consummated romance with the American language” (The New York Times Book Review).




Last Stories and Other Stories


Book Description

Supernaturally tinged stories from William T. Vollmann, author of the National Book Award winner Europe Central Watch for Vollmann’s new work of nonfiction, No Immediate Danger, coming in April of 2018 In this magnificent new work of fiction, his first in nine years, celebrated author William T. Vollmann offers a collection of ghost stories linked by themes of love, death, and the erotic. A Bohemian farmer’s dead wife returns to him, and their love endures, but at a gruesome price. A geisha prolongs her life by turning into a cherry tree. A journalist, haunted by the half-forgotten killing of a Bosnian couple, watches their story, and his own wartime tragedy, slip away from him. A dying American romances the ghost of his high school sweetheart while a homeless salaryman in Tokyo animates paper cutouts of ancient heroes. Are ghosts memories, fantasies, or monsters? Is there life in death? Vollmann has always operated in the shadowy borderland between categories, and these eerie tales, however far-flung their settings, all focus on the attempts of the living to avoid, control, or even seduce death. Vollmann’s stories will transport readers to a fantastical world where love and lust make anything possible.




Bugsy & Other Stories


Book Description

From the author of Confidence and The Comedown comes a wildly imaginative story collection about queerness, neurodivergence, sexuality, and self-discovery. Frumkin’s latest book is a deliciously entertaining collection of five genre-defying stories that range from downright hilarious to brilliantly unhinged. Taken together, they celebrate a wide variety of human experiences. In the title story, a queer young adult with bipolar disorder drops out of college in a fog of depression, aimlessly drifting between maintaining their job at a fast food restaurant and dodging their mom’s texts. But when they fall in with a group of sex workers starring in BDSM films, they find radical freedom, love, and community. In other stories, we meet a psychiatrist whose meticulously-maintained life is upended by an Alex Trebek-like voice in his head, an e-girl celebrity who is being courted by a delusional fan, a young boy on the spectrum at odds with a neurotypical world determined to “cure” him, and an elderly woman whose consciousness is being transformed by her oncoming death. With incredible insight, compassion, and honesty, Frumkin unravels each story with tantalizing precision. Sexy and raw—and compulsively readable—this collection offers a look at our innermost selves as we all try to make sense of the world and our place in it.




The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories


Book Description

Steve Almond, the man whose candy jones fueled the bestseller Candyfreak, returns with a collection of stories that both seals his reputation as a master of the modern form and risks getting him arrested. The cast of characters in The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories includes a wealthy family certain they have been abducted by space aliens, a sexy magazine editor who falls for a worldclass cad, and a beleaguered dentist who refuses to read his best friend’s novel. Michael Jackson and Abraham Lincoln make cameos, as do a variety of desperate and beautiful loonies, all of whom are laid bare, often literally. In these twelve stories, Almond refuses to let his characters off the hook, or to abandon them, until we have seen the full measure of ourselves within their struggle.




The Succubus and Other Stories


Book Description

Short stories of varying lengths. Over 600 pages. SF, fantasy, horror, aberration and weirdness. Time travel, virtual reality, cloning. Murder in various modes of brutality. Sex, rape, necrophilia. SANTA CLAUS SEX CRIMINAL: a look at the pedophile. Torture. Vomit. The transcosmic environment of the moid. Life after death. Complications involving a demon. A story including a serial killer. Murdered by a ghost. High quality literary fiction to mainline to your mind.




Standing by


Book Description




Evil Water: And Other Stories


Book Description

In his fourth short-story collection, Watson again demonstrates the extraordinary scope of his imagination. The title story has ancient witchcraft meeting complacent modern suburbia in a tale of spine-chilling horror, while 'When the Timegate Failed' casts an unexpected light in the dangers of space travel and man's powers of self-delusion. Alien matters of a different kind crop up in 'Windows', in which mysterious artefacts found on Mars prove to be something of a problem for their chic human owners. Evil Water is a highly inventive collection which is a delight to read.




Voices from the Wasteland and Other Stories


Book Description

VOICES FROM THE WASTELAND and other stories. Showcase.....................................a weekend for entertainment agent trouble-shooter Ronnie Littlewood, that does not go according to his well thought through planning, in this third story about the ex-comedian. The Box.........................................is a Kodak box Brownie Camera that holds a dark, sinister secret for its owner. But it is his loyal friend who takes on the task to unravel what it all means. The Park Bench............................is a refuge, a place of solace and tranquillity for one woman to contemplate where her life has led her. It is also a place where she finally come to terms with her situation. Voices From The Wasteland......began as a Theatre In Education Project inspired by a cutting in a Manchester newspaper under the heading ‘body of an unidentified man found in alley’. From there it became a musical and then a fourteen track album. However, it has always been the wish of the author to write it as a story and now with many of the lyrics from the original musical interspersing with the narrative, his wish has come true. Cover illustration. ‘Winter Moon On Canal’ By R S Gardner. Courtesy of Clark Art Ltd




Something Inside


Book Description

In the last twenty years, gay literature has earned a place at the American and British literary tables, spawning its own constellation of important writers and winning a dedicated audience. No one, though, until Philip Gambone, has attempted to offer a collective portrait of our most important gay fiction writers. This selection of interviews attempts just that and is notable both for the depth of Gambone's probing conversations and for the sheer range of important authors included. Allen Barnett Christopher Bram Peter Cameron Bernard Cooper Dennis Cooper Michael Cunningham Brad Gooch Joseph Hansen Scott Heim Andrew Holleran Alan Hollinghurst Brian Keith Jackson Randall Kenan David Leavitt Michael Lowenthal Paul Monette Michael Nava David Plante John Preston Lev Raphael Edmund White