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But Mikey quickly discovers that life in the outside world isn't all he expected. After learning his father had put a contract out on him and that he was being hunted down by gangs of thugs determined to claim their reward, Mikey realises that life will never be the same again.
Brimming with unforgettable characters, this extraordinary coming-of-age story will remind you that sometimes it takes courage (and the odd Disney song) to be the person you were meant to be.
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Fiction. Estranged from her father and four brothers after her mother’s death, Carson Cartwright is not expecting a call from her twin. He urges a reconciliation before their father succumbs to his final illness. Though she has spent more than a decade trying to forget her family existed, the circumstances pull her back to the Montana ranch where she grew up.
Carson discovers her brothers divided over plans to change their working ranch into a guest ranch, and their consultant, Kerry Elder, doesn’t seem above using her wiles to get her way. Kerry finds that while she may have her clients right where she wants them, it’s the wayward sister that may be awakening something she has long denied.
The big Montana sky crackles with thunder and lightning as emotions twist in unbidden directions. Neither Carson nor Kerry is prepared for the wild storms of summer.
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Fiction. Imagine you give a dinner party and a friend of a friend brings a stranger to your house as his guest. He seems pleasant enough.
Imagine that this stranger goes upstairs halfway through the dinner party and locks himself in one of your bedrooms and won't come out. Imagine you can't move him for days, weeks, months. If ever.
This is what Miles does, in a chichi house in the historic borough of Greenwich, in the year 2009-10, in There but for the. Who is Miles, then? And what does it mean, exactly, to live with other people?
Sharply satirical and sharply compassionate, with an eye to the meanings of the smallest of words and the slightest of resonances, There but for the fuses disparate perspectives in a crucially communal expression of identity and explores our very human attempts to navigate between despair and hope, enormity and intimacy, cliché and grace. Ali Smith's dazzling new novel is a funny, moving book about time, memory, thought, presence, quietness in a noisy time, and the importance of hearing ourselves think.
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Fiction. When Rory Blaine inherits his grandmother’s crumbling London mansion, he’s persuaded to create Britain’s first retirement home for gay men. Thirty years earlier, the teenage Rory had been exiled from the house, the only home he’d ever known, when his sexuality was discovered. Now middle-aged, he appears to be a tough, carefree hedonist but in reality is rootless, damaged and lonely.
The prospective residents, Rory’s ‘boys’, are an eclectic bunch, united only by healthy bank balances and a longing to grow old in a sympathetic haven. But the project becomes threatened, not only when the house is ‘outed’ by the tabloids but by Rory’s complex and shifting relationships with his new young partner Faisal, with Vic d’Orsay, an elderly singing star who has funded the restoration for mysterious reasons and, above all, with the carefully constructed character he has built around himself. And then, suddenly, there is a woman in his life...
Funny, sharp and moving, Rory's Boys is about one man's struggle to accept who he is and about the need most of us have to find some sort of family.
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In the Hausa–speaking region of northern Nigeria, Shari'a or Islamic law, requires strict separation of the sexes and different rules of behavior for women and men in virtually every facet of life. Allah Made Us: Sexual Outlaws in an Islamic African City is about the men who break those rules. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the ancient Islamic city–state of Kano, Allah Made Us analyzes the social experiences and expressive culture of ‘yan daudu (feminine men in Nigerian Hausaland) in relation to local, national, and global debates over gender and sexuality at the turn of the twenty–first century. Rudolf Gaudio explores how ‘yan daudu use language, their bodies and other media (including food, clothing, and video) to ‘play’ with what it means to be male and female.
In this innovative text, cultural anthropologist and linguist Rudolf Gaudio offers not only a rich and highly engrossing ethnographic account of these sexual outlaws, but also provides those readers with little background in linguistic anthropology, cultural anthropology, and queer studies a primer to key concepts by presenting a range of sophisticated ideas in an accessible manner. To order by e-mail click here:
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Fiction. When Oliver loses his job and his lover in the space of a few months, he wonders if he will ever know happiness again. Unexpectedly, his life is transformed when he encounters an extraordinarily beautiful red-head on a train just minutes before a stranger in a pub offers him money to courier a mysterious package out of the country. Opportunities for cash, travel and adventure are suddenly within his grasp, as well as, amazingly, the young man to share them with. But when dreams come true, the aftermath is seldom predictable, and Oliver finds himself drawn into the outer orbits of a shadowy world of art theft and drug smuggling, and into a relationship whose roller-coaster progress will test him to his limits. Getting Orlando is a story of adventure, travel and romantic obsession.
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'I kissed my father once, when he was sleeping.'
Nevis Gow is fifteen. For eleven years he has lived in a van with his father Marshall, travelling the country. They don t need people or school or jobs. All they need is each other. But Nevis doesn t just love his father, he s in love with him too. Until one day Marshall crashes the van and everything changes. Stranded on a remote Highland farm amid a family overshadowed by grief, Marshall tries to steer them back to normality while Nevis fights to keep things the way they were. Soon, though, he comes to realise that nothing about his lost life in the van was quite as it seemed. In Nevis s meticulously detailed record of events, lines blur between love and obsession, reality and wish-fulfilment, dreams and memory. Shocking, funny and poignant, this is the first novel by a young writer of remarkable talent. To order by e-mail click here:
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'Emily Mackie's wonderful novel is a rare thing, delicate and dangerous at the same time. The plot is raw and shocking, the slow reveal is strikingly accomplished, the detail of the writing is fine and funny and precise' -Tessa Hadley
"Unlimited Intimacy is novel, fascinating, insightful, and courageous. Tim Dean convincingly argues that confronting head-on a sexual subculture that is alien to most readers, and understanding the fantasies that propel it, is a very good way of stimulating thought - not only about that subculture, but about one's own choices and behavior, and about the general social process of demonizing and pathologizing certain sexual practices." - Martha Nussbaum
Barebacking - when gay men deliberately abandon condoms and embrace unprotected sex - has incited a great deal of shock, outrage, anger, and even disgust, but very little contemplation. Purposely flying in the face of decades of safe-sex campaigning and HIV/AIDS awareness initiatives, barebacking is unquestionably radical behavior, behavior that most people would rather condemn than understand. Thus the time is ripe for "Unlimited Intimacy", Tim Dean's riveting investigation into barebacking and the distinctive subculture that has grown around it. Audacious and undeniably provocative, Dean's profoundly reflective account is neither a manifesto nor an apology; instead, it is a searching analysis that tests the very limits of the study of sex in the twenty-first century. Dean's extensive research into the subculture provides a tour of the scene's bars, sex clubs, and Web sites; offers an explicit but sophisticated analysis of its pornography; and, documents his own personal experiences in the culture. But ultimately, it is HIV that animates the controversy around barebacking, and "Unlimited Intimacy" explores how barebackers think about transmitting the virus - especially the idea that deliberately sharing it establishes a new network of kinship among the infected. According to Dean, intimacy makes us vulnerable, exposes us to emotional risk, and forces us to drop our psychological barriers. As a committed experiment in intimacy without limits - one that makes those metaphors of intimacy quite literal - barebacking thus says a great deal about how intimacy works. Written with a fierce intelligence and uncompromising nerve, "Unlimited Intimacy" will prove to be a milestone in our understanding of sexual behavior.
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Things look bad for Rick Lahrem, a high school sophomore in a cookie-cutter Chicago suburb in 1976. His mother's second husband is a licensed psychologist who eats like an ape, his stepsister is a stoner slut, and his father is engaged to a Southern belle. Rick's only solace is his growing collection of original Broadway-cast LPs, bought on the sly at Wax Trax. After he brings two girls in speech class to tears by reading a story aloud, Rick is coaxed onto the interscholastic forensics team to perform an eight-minute dramatic interpretation of The Boys in the Band, the controversial sixties play about homosexuality. Unexpectedly successful at this oddball event, Rick begins winning tournaments and making friends with his teammates. Rick also discovers the joys of sex - with a speech coach from a rival school - just as his mother, reacting to a deteriorating home environment, makes an unnerving commitment to Christ. The newly confident Rick assumes this too shall pass - until the combined forces of family, sex, and faith threaten to undo him at the state meet in Peoria. James Magruder's "Sugarless" offers a ruefully entertaining take on the simultaneous struggles of coming-out, coming-of-age, and coming-to-Jesus.
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This is a radical book, which brings together the fields of political theory and television studies. In one of the first books to do so, Samuel A. Chambers exposes and explores the cultural politics of television by treating television shows--includingSix Feet Under, Buffy, Desperate Housewives, The L Word, and Big Love--as serious, important texts and reading them in detail through the lens of queer theory.
Samuel A. Chambers makes the case for the profound significance of "the cultural politics of television," the way in which a television show's text itself engages with the politics of its day. He argues for queer theory's essential contribution to any understanding of the political, and initiates a larger project of queer television studies. This is an important and fresh contribution to queer theory and to the understanding of television as politics.
Samuel A. Chambers teaches political theory at Johns Hopkins University. He writes broadly in political theory, including work on language, culture, and the politics of gender and sexuality. He is co-author, with Terrell Carver, of Judith Butler and Political Theory (2008).
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