The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories - Softcover

In this provocative, wonderfully varied anthology, a formidable array of talents--gay and straight, men and women--investigate the experience of love between men, the individualistic complexity of gay male identity and gay men's relationships with lovers, friends and family. Highlights include Graham Greene's story about a newly wed but secretly gay man on a Mediterranean honeymoon with his wife, William Trevor's tale of hypocrisy at an English boys' school and works by Larry Kramer, Edmund White, Christopher Coe, Allan Gurganus, Ann Beattie, Edna O'Brien, D. H. Lawrence, Noel Coward, Sherwood Anderson and E. M. Forster. A third of the 39 selections appear here for the first time, alongside familiar pieces such as J. R. Ackerley's unsparingly candid account of his sex life and John Cheever's portrayal of love in prison from the novel Falconer . Several pieces may startle or provoke, such as Stephen Greco's raw, defiant dream-memory of the gay scene before AIDS; A. M. Holmes's graphically explicit romp involving two schoolmates in a bathtub; and James Kirkup's story of an American college teacher in Japan who goes to bed with one of his students. The tragedy of AIDS and its emotional and social impact are movingly depicted in stories by Peter Wells, Michael Cunningham, co-editor Leavitt and, one of its victims, the late Allen Barnett.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This 39-story collection is an important addition to gay literature that encompasses nearly a century of writing. It casts aside the notions of so much pre-1980s writing that presupposed a gay ghetto where men suffered more at each other's hands than from straight oppressors' persecution, an unalterable chasm between gays and the rest of the world, and the suffocating oppression of a double, half-secret life. The stories individually often treat themes of homosexual self-identity, but the characters in them are defined not so much by their sexuality as by their relative positions in society and their shifting relationships with each other, their friends, wives, children, and families. The authors represented in this wide-ranging assemblage are not exclusively gay males and include Ann Beattie, Barbara Pym, and Edna O'Brien. More expectably present are Noel Coward, Christopher Isherwood, Larry Kramer (in a stunning tour de force of Jewish ethnicity, "Mrs. Tefillin"), Paul Bailey indulging his meditations on semen or "spunk," and A. M. Homes, who is in fact a woman able to write with astonishing authenticity from the point of view of teenage boys. Whitney Scott