General Fiction Books

When Ray O’Brien volunteers to raft the Grand Canyon with a research team, the last thing he expects is murder. After a few days on a river closed to the public, one of the volunteers is found struck dead on a secluded beach. Sixty wilderness miles from contact with other people, the group must carry on in total isolation, sure someone committed murder and may kill again. 

Despite the terrible timing, Ray falls for Duke, the group’s handsome ranger, who seems to return the attraction. Ray and Duke join forces with Jenny Bridger, the group leader, to solve the mystery. Jenny must act with confidence and decisiveness but meets puzzling resistance from the volunteers. Ensuring safe passage for all will mean overcoming the group’s misgivings and slaying Jenny’s own demons, but her compassion for the victim’s widow may lead them all astray.

The age-old Canyon becomes more and more ominous as the group fights to survive alone in nature and uncover a murderer among them.

After a bitter and humiliating breakup, Charlie Vernon lives not-quite-alone in his Capitol Hill town house. He kept his beloved dog, Mamie, the cockapoo that he and Freddie adopted together, but he’s just arrived home to find he’s been visited by thieves…and they’ve taken Mamie.

For the next thirty-six hours, he and his family of choice—a pair of rhyming lesbians, a Georgia-born man who might be married to a sex addict, and the hostess of DC’s hottest Drag Bingo—will band together to search for Mamie. What’s at stake isn’t just a cherished pet, but whether Charlie will be brave enough to love anything or anyone, ever again.


“Eric Peterson’s debut novel is a heartwarming and charming tale of love, loss, community, and self-discovery featuring man’s best friends of the two- and four-legged kind. A delightful read.” —Michael Nava, Lambda Literary Award-winning author of Lies With Man

Elijah Golden and Justin Monroe are uncle and nephew with eclectic careers, friends, and family in LA, trying to center joy in their lives.Then their worlds turn in ways nobody expects.

Elijah, a dedicated thespian, auditions by day, does theater by night, and works two jobs on weekends. With enough life for three people, he keeps his recently divorced partner Zaire coasting on bliss…until secrets and real-life dramas test their love.

Justin, Elijah’s uncle, is a single father with teenage twins, and a TV journalist who’s been replaced at the anchor desk when new management arrives. No longer in the public eye, living true to his sexuality is something Justin can finally do. Dating and romance—Justin’s ready for fun. Conflicts with fatherhood and career—he’ll have none.

Elijah and Justin seek happily-ever-afters, but are they too busy to notice happy when it’s there?

For 21-year-old gay virgin Gabe Rafferty, the first decade of adulthood is unpredictable and intense. 

Flat broke upon college graduation, Gabe navigates the passage from menial work to globetrotting corporate drudge, then strives for a real chance at professional fulfillment. His journey exploring his sexuality—from inhibited innocence, to first-love crises, to random hookups—doesn’t seem to lead to the more sensual, committed relationships he wants. Then he meets Marty, an African American art student, and Gabe must face his white working-class background and racist father for a chance at true love.

Throughout, he traverses the joys and hazards of loving a headstrong cast of friends, including a lesbian couple, and Candy, a straight female friend whose life intersects with Gabe’s in unexpected ways.

For Gabe, what happens after coming of age and coming out is a scramble to survive first journeys into sex, love, and livelihood.

Andre met his best friend Amy on a night like tonight. The way Amy tells it she had to stop him from climbing over the bar at Aunty Bob’s to punch the bartender, though if you ask Andre he’ll say, “What? That never happened. I don’t even know what you’re saying to me right now.” 

Now Amy is worryingly missing in action, and Andre goes to Aunty Bob’s on a quest to find her. No sooner does he walk in with his depressingly heterosexual date than his best hat is spirited away by a lesbian in the throes of breaking up with her girlfriend. She in turn has it stolen from her when she starts a fight with two twinks at the bar. The hat makes its way around Aunty Bob’s from one head to another, giving glimpses into the dozens of stories playing out at the same time, unaware of each other but colliding in catastrophic ways. Can Andre find Amy before this party devolves into a nightmare of broken hearts, malevolent drag queens, and spontaneous human combustion? Or has it always happened this way, every night, at Aunty Bob’s Quake City Club?

Determined to record every summer day, young history teacher Luke Devlin starts school vacation imagining he’ll describe backcountry adventures in the Rockies and sun-splashed days home in Denver. But all too soon the season veers into crisis, when his older brother faces life-threatening illness and Luke becomes entangled in a love affair that’s as fast-moving and possibly as fatal as his brother’s diagnosis.

As Luke manages the household for his absent parents and struggles with the constant pressure of his unfinished master’s deadline, his fling with a Wyoming rancher grows serious just as his brother’s crisis overwhelms him. Luke’s love of his native ground and his search for romance collide with the hard realities of mortality and loss during an unexpected summer.

When struggling actor Phillip Stalworth breaks up with his girlfriend, he returns home to the Deep South to care for his ailing mother and unexpectedly falls for a local carpenter. Working through his past with his complicated family, some old high school chums, and the desperate characters who grace his hometown, Phillip ultimately finds his own voice as his mother is finally regaining hers.

Already an award-winning film, Counting for Thunder was inspired by writer Phillip Irwin Cooper’s personal experience and, like Augusten Burroughs, covers many of the universal themes of love, life, sex, and death with his own brand of gallows wit. Phillip’s three-year quest is a hero’s journey proving we truly can go home again to learn the lessons we should have mastered the first time around.

Outside a hospital in Ottawa, a heartbeat returns long enough for a good-bye. Downtown, a man steps into shadows of the past to help those who have died find their way free from their memories. In Niagara, an icewine vintage is flavored with the truth of what happened on a dark evening of betrayal. In British Columbia, the snow itself can speak to someone who knows how to listen. 

The past echoes through these queer tales—sometimes soft enough to grant a second chance at love, and other times loud enough to damn a killer—never without leaving those who’ve heard it unchanged. 

Of Echoes Born is the first short story collection from Lambda Literary Award finalist ’Nathan Burgoine.

Advance praise from Publishers Weekly: "Burgoine assembles 12 queer supernatural tales, several of which interlock...The best tales could easily stand alone; these include 'The Finish,' about an aging vintner whose erotic dalliance with a deaf young man named Dennis gets complicated, and 'Struck,' in which beleaguered bookstore clerk Chris meets Lightning Todd, who predicts his future wealth and romance. A pair of stories set in 'the Village,' a gay neighborhood, feature appealing characters and romances and could be components of a fine Tales of the City–like novel."

“Different is a brave thing to be,” a mother tells her five-year-old daughter. During the 1960s and 1970s, when things for gays and lesbians were starting to change in larger cities, in the Midwest, different was not a safe thing to be. A memorable cast of characters, a sympathetic, believable, tight-knit community of friends and rivals, fill out the interconnected stories with butches, femmes, go-go dancers, and drag queens who try to find their way in an unaccepting culture by becoming a family of choice. Anyone who has ever been on the outside looking in will feel at home on “the levee.”

Reprint

A school in turmoil over its senior play, a sly career as a teenage gigolo, an unpredictable girlfriend with damage of her own, and a dangerous housebreaker tied up downstairs. Any of these would make a great plot for budding filmmaker Eric's first movie.

Unfortunately, they're his real life.

When Julien, a handsome wannabe actor, transfers to Eric's class, he's a distraction, a rival, and one complication too many. Yet Eric can't stop thinking about him. Helped by Eric's girlfriend, Mary, they embark on a project that dangerously crosses the line between filmmaking and reality. As the boys become close, Eric soon wants to cross other lines entirely. Does Julien feel the same way, or is Eric being used on the gleefully twisted path to fame?

Never have there been only two gendersmale and female. A third gender, denied by society and hidden by the medical community, has always existed, and that is what Sophie Schmidt discovers when, at the age of fourteen, she learns the truth of how she was born. Sophie then embarks on a journey to learn more about her true self and to find others born like her. When Sophie moves to New York City, she enters the world of gays and lesbians, as well as those who are transgender and transsexual. Searching for her own place in society, her journey leads her to Alice Parker, and Sophie takes the final steps to accept herself enough to allow another to love her.

An anthology of short fiction featuring the finalist selections from the 2013 Saints + Sinners Literary Festival.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Introduction by Felice Picano
• What Took You So Long? by Vince Sgambati
• It Only Occurred to Me Later by Anne Laughlin
• Bruno's Last Supper by Jeff Lindemann
• The Favor of a Reply by Joe Landrum
• Thou Shalt Not Lie by N.S. Beranek
• In a Chamber of My Heart by Sandra Gail Lambert
• Mountainview by James Russell
• Looking for Philip by George E. Jordan
• Bucky and the Woods Cop by Jim Stewart
• Silver Pumps and a Loose Nut by J.R. Greenwell
• Stained Glass by Karis Walsh
• Sky Blue by 'Nathan Burgoine

Handsome and charmingly shy, Ricky Fontana may be the greatest ballplayer who ever lived. Hitting a baseball has always come easy for the New York Mets outfielder—his true challenge comes when skyrocketing fame threatens to reveal his deepest secret: Ricky Fontana is gay.

Jeremy Rusch—a tabloid sportswriter hardened by drink and disappointment—follows Ricky Fontana as the young champ aims to break one of baseball's most treasured records: the 56-game hitting streak that immortalized Joe DiMaggio in 1941. As a rapt nation watches Fontana lash hit after hit, creeping toward DiMaggio's impossible number, the idol of the sports pages becomes an American hero. From the White House to Hollywood, everyone wants to shake hands with Ricky Fontana. And it doesn't take long for his carefully guarded secret to come to light—thanks to a front-page exposé by Jeremy Rusch.

When he discovers Ricky's secret, Rusch envisions recognition to rival that of his idol. The reporter's obsession creates a national furor, turning one baseball summer into a season that nobody can ignore.

Wedding planner Adam More has an epiphany: He has devoted all his life's energy to creating events that he and his partner Steven are forbidden by federal law for having for themselves. So Adam decides to make a change. Organizing a boycott of the wedding industry, Steven and Adam call on gay organists, hairdressers, cater-waiters, priests, and hairdressers everywhere to get out of the business and to stop going to weddings, too. In this screwball, romantic comedy both the movement they've begun and their relationship are put in jeopardy when Steven's brother proposes to Adam's sister and they must decide whether they're attending or sending regrets.

Twelve O'Clock Tales is the fourth collection of short fiction by legendary novelist and memoirist, Felice Picano (The Lure, Like People in History, True Stories). A personal homage to the storytellers of his youth, Edgar Allen Poe, E.F. Benson, and H. P. Lovecraft, as well as his acquaintances, Arthur C. Clarke and Harlan Ellison. Thirteen dark tales, eerie, bizarre, and dreamlike, the tales will thrill and disturb, discomfort and titillate, enthrall and leave you wondering. Picano ranges across time and space, from tribal West Africa to the American heartland, to a lab in Venezuela, and a California Highway fifteen years from now. His characters range from a teen accident survivor with a secret, to a far-future scholar forced to travel to a galactic backwater, to a retired L.A. cop who dabbles in astrology, and a peasant girl in B.C.E. Israel encountering the strangest of strangers. The thirteen tales include brand new stories and acknowledged Picano masterworks collected here for the first time.