Search Results

The Penguin book of gay short stories

Title

The Penguin book of gay short stories / edited by David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell ; introduction by David Leavitt.

Format

Book

Published

New York : Viking, 1994.

Description

xxviii, 655 p. ; 24 cm.

Other contributors

Leavitt, David, 1961- Mitchell, Mark (Mark Lindsey)

Portion of title

Gay short stories

Contents

• A poem of friendship / D.H. Lawrence
• Arthur Snatchfold / E.M. Forster
• Sally Bowles / Christopher Isherwood
• Me and the girls / Noël Coward
• My father and myself [excerpt] / J.R. Ackerley
• May we borrow your husband? / Graham Greene
• Hands / Sherwood Anderson
• The teacher of American business English / James Kirkup
• Falconer [excerpt] / John Cheever
• The folded leaf [excerpt] / William Maxwell
• Servants with torches / Donald Windham
• Jimmy / Desmond Hogan
• Torridge / William Trevor
• Some of these days / James Purdy
• A glass of blessings [excerpt] / Barbara Pym
• Reprise / Edmund White
• Dramas / Edna O'Brien
• Mrs. Tefillin / Larry Kramer
• Spunk / Paul Bailey
• The Times as it knows us / Allen Barnett.

• The princess from Africa / David Plante
• Adult art / Allan Gurganus
• The Cinderella waltz / Ann Beattie
• Good with words / Stephen Greco
• Nothing to ask for / Dennis McFarland
• Ignorant armies / Michael Cunningham
• Run, mourner, run / Randall Kenan
• Six fables / Bernard Cooper
• Perrin and the fallen angel / Peter Wells
• My mother's clothes: the school of beauty and shame / Richard McCann
• A place I've never been / David Leavitt
• Notes towards a performance of Jean Racine's tragedy Athalie / Neil Bartlett
• Buried treasure / Gary Glickman
• Self-portrait in twenty-three rounds / David Wojnarowicz
• Jump or dive / Peter Cameron
• Gentlemen can wash their hands in the gents' / Christopher Coe
• The dancing lesson / Gerry Albarelli
• A real doll ; The whiz kids / A.M. Homes.

Review

"This is an anthology of stories that, in the words of its co-editor David Leavitt, "illuminate the experience of love between men, explore the nature of homosexual identity, or investigate the kinds of relationships gay men have with each other, with their friends, and with their families." It is not a collection of stories written exclusively by gay authors; indeed, readers may be surprised to discover that some of their favorite women writers and straight male writers have also explored the territory. What the stories do share is a refusal to ghettoize gay men as denizens of the gay nocturnal subculture. The men in these stories live very much in the world; their sexuality, though an important aspect of their lives, doesn't singularly define them." "The thirty-nine stories brought together here suggest the ways in which gay experience has - and hasn't - changed over the course of this century, starting with the tender, unarticulated longings of two boys swimming in D.H. Lawrence's "A Poem of Friendship" and ending with the explicit sexual interaction of two boys in a bathtub in A.M. Homes's "The Whiz Kids." In between there is every imaginable kind of gay story, as offered by well-known authors and by those less familiar to the devotees of the genre. There is wry humor in Barbara Pym's clever manipulation of romantic convention; painful accounts of discovery in Larry Kramer's "Mrs. Tefillin"; the consolation of age in Edmund White's "Reprise"; and in Randall Kenan's "Run, Mourner, Run," the breaking of both racial and sexual taboos. The anthology also encompasses a richly diverse subcategory of stories inspired by AIDS, from such writers as Allen Barnett, Michael Cunningham, Stephen Greco, Dennis McFarland, and Peter Wells: stories that explore not only the tragedy of the epidemic but also the triumphs, even the erotic possibilities, that have been generated in its wake."

Summary

"These stories illuminate the common ground of gay male experience - as well as its astonishing diversity."--Jacket.

Subject headings

Gay men--Fiction. Short stories, English. Short stories, American. English fiction. American fiction.

Genre heading

Short stories.

ISBN

0670854689 : 9780670854684