Gay Books for the Summer
Discover the best gay books for summer! Dive into our curated list of LGBTQ+ reads perfect for beach days, vacations, and warm-weather relaxation.
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The Buddha of Suburbia
by Hanif Kureishi
“A wickedly funny novel” (The New York Times) from the author of SHATTERED “There was one copy going round our school like contraband. I read it in one sitting...I'd never read a book about anyone remotely like me before.”—Zadie Smith My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost... The hero of Hanif Kureishi's debut novel is dreamy teenager Karim, desperate to escape suburban South London and experience the forbidden fruits which the 1970s seem to offer. When the unlikely opportunity of a life in the theatre announces itself, Karim starts to win the sort of attention he has been craving—albeit with some rude and raucous results. With the publication of The Buddha of Suburbia, Hanif Kureishi landed into the literary landscape as a distinct new voice and a fearless taboo-breaking writer. The novel inspired a ground-breaking BBC series featuring a soundtrack by David Bowie. Winner of the Whitbread Prize for Best First Novel
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Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn Waugh's most celebrated novel is a memory drama about the intense entanglement of the narrator, Charles Ryder, with a great Anglo-Catholic family. Written during World War II, the novel mourns the passing of the aristocratic world Waugh knew in his youth and vividly recalls the sensuous plea-sures denied him by wartime austerities; in so doing it also provides a profound study of the conflict between the demands of religion and the desires of the flesh. At once romantic, sensuous, comic, and somber, "Brideshead Revisited" transcends Waugh's familiar satiric exploration of his cast of lords and ladies, Catholics and eccentrics, artists and misfits, revealing him to be an elegiac, lyrical novelist of the utmost feeling and lucidity. The edition reprinted here contains Waugh's revisions, made in 1959, and his preface to the revised edition.
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The Book of Lies
by Felice Picano
Bright, ambitious, and handsome, Ross Ohrenstedt is a high flier in the fashionable field of queer studies. He has just taken a prestigious university position in Los Angeles and has been appointed to oversee the collection of papers and works of a leading light of the gay literary salon known as the Purple Circle. Ross stumbles across a lost work by an unknown author and his quest to identify the mystery writer and achieve the glory of scholastic tenure unveils increasingly bizarre and unbalanced facts about a group of writers who in the 1970s and 1980s broke new ground in the creation of a gay literary sensibility. But the dark truth contained within The Book of Lies is even more startling. With biting wit and a lush sense of place and character, Felice Picano's daring novel is at once a stylish mystery, a comical roman A clef, and a wicked send-up of the new Ivory Tower. Leave it to Felice Picano to add a walloping dose of melodrama and intrigue to a tale already redrawing genre boundaries...What Picano does is take an academic mystery (subject matter that might have proved tedious or solipsistic in lesser hands) and morphs it into something new--a page-turning, often campy, occasionally serious critique of academia and historical truth, literary celebrity, and the imminent future of America.-Philadelphia Tribune Felice Picano is the author of 19 books including the best-selling novels Like People In History, Looking Glass Lives, The Lure and Eyes as well as the literary memoirs Ambidextrous, Men Who Loved Me, and A House On the Ocean, A House On the Bay. He is also the author with Dr. Charles Silverstein of The New Joy of Gay Sex. A native of New York, Felice Picano now lives in Los Angeles.
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Three Junes
by Julia Glass
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An astonishing novel that traces the lives of a Scottish family over a decade as they confront the joys and longings, fulfillments and betrayals of love in all its guises. In June of 1989 Paul McLeod, a newspaper publisher and recent widower, travels to Greece, where he falls for a young American artist and reflects on the complicated truth about his marriage.... Six years later, again in June, Paul’s death draws his three grown sons and their families back to their ancestral home. Fenno, the eldest, a wry, introspective gay man, narrates the events of this unforeseen reunion. Far from his straitlaced expatriate life as a bookseller in Greenwich Village, Fenno is stunned by a series of revelations that threaten his carefully crafted defenses.... Four years farther on, in yet another June, a chance meeting on the Long Island shore brings Fenno together with Fern Olitsky, the artist who once captivated his father. Now pregnant, Fern must weigh her guilt about the past against her wishes for the future and decide what family means to her. In prose rich with compassion and wit, Three Junes paints a haunting portrait of love’s redemptive powers.
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Always Have, Always Will
by Quinn Brockton
This popular new line of books follows your favorite Queer as Folk characters on a riveting journey of sexual self-discovery with stories about the beloved characters from the record-breaking Showtime series. USA Today raves, "There's never been anything else like it on TV"—and there's never been a book series like this. Life after college brings a lot more freedom—and a lot of new problems. Brian must trade his status as BMOC for the bottom rung of the corporate ladder, while Michael, who has long given up on college, now wonders if he's also given up on his dreams. Emmett visits Pittsburgh to celebrate the spectacular launch of his fashion marketing company in Los Angeles (or so everyone thinks), while Deb adds gay rights advocacy to her juggling act of working at the diner and taking care of her ailing brother, Vic. Like Lindsay—who experiences life as a struggling artist and true love for the first time—Deb's about to get more than she bargained for. Add in a secret romance, sexually charged office politics, an over-the-top drag ball, and the arrival of new friends and lovers, and our little gang is tested enough to qualify for postgraduate credit. More than ever before, Michael and Brian find their friendship challenged. As their choices tear them apart, Brian sees that it's Michael he's always loved, and that he always will. But will he tell him before it's too late?
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Book
Death in Venice
by Thomas Mann
The world-famous masterpiece by Nobel laureate Thomas Mann -- here in a new translation by Michael Henry Heim Published on the eve of World War I, a decade after Buddenbrooks had established Thomas Mann as a literary celebrity, Death in Venice tells the story of Gustav von Aschenbach, a successful but aging writer who follows his wanderlust to Venice in search of spiritual fulfillment that instead leads to his erotic doom. In the decaying city, besieged by an unnamed epidemic, he becomes obsessed with an exquisite Polish boy, Tadzio. "It is a story of the voluptuousness of doom," Mann wrote. "But the problem I had especially in mind was that of the artist's dignity."
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