Showing results by publisher "Lethe Press" in All Categories

The year is 1935, but this is an America where cross-dressing goes almost unremarked, often unnoticed, and gay relationships are mundane; gay marriage, a quotidian fact of life. Famed chef and female impersonator Pancetta Brulee of New Orleans has been hired to cater a gay engagement party for two prominent grooms at the infamous Faux Pas Island and the Robicheaux estate. Both the family and island have a terrible past, and most Cajuns and Creoles avoid the place like the plague.

Gavin Atlas, author of the best-selling collection, The Boy Can't Help It, offers a second dose of porn stars, college boys, strippers, acrobats, and athletes taken body and soul by business tycoons, cops, mischievous professors, and other dominant men who won't take no for an answer. Your journey through these stories will offer humor, affection, and true devotion, but please stay seated as you're taken deep into the psychology of sexual mischief.

Not every gay teen yearns for fashion and popular culture. Some boys are pure country folk and like the feel of flannel and the smell of the farm. And they're neither lithe nor muscle-bound but stocky boys, the ones who develop hairy chests, arms, and faces years earlier than their peers. One such seventeen-year-old is Travis Ferrell, shy among most of the other kids at school, but proud of his West Virginia roots. He has not yet admitted his passion for handsome guys - and his idea of what handsome is and what handsome does is not much different from him.

With one diagnosis, editor James Daniels learns that he's literally running out of time. Looking at his life, he sees one regret: Andy, the one that got away. Andy was the first man that James ever loved, but Andy has been gone for years, and might not want to be found.

During the Civil War, two young soldiers on opposite sides find themselves drawn together. One is a war-weary scholarly Southerner who has seen too much bloodshed, especially the tortures inflicted upon the enemy by his vicious commanding officer. The other is a Herculean Yankee captured by the rag-tag Confederate band. When these two find themselves admiring more than each other's spirit and demeanor, when passions erupt between captor and captive, will this new romance survive the arduous trek to Purgatory Mountain?

What an era it was, racks of magazines with hot guys on the glossy cover and hotter ones inside. Tucked in among the slick photos were stories, two or three to an issue, of fiction by a host of writers, including Dale Chase who spent eight lively years writing about sex with mechanics, bikers, professors, politicians, and a host of others; sex in traffic school, supply rooms, and onstage at the theater; and sex in just about every venue you can imagine and a few you can't.

Underworld Dreams is Daniel Braum’s third short story collection of genre transcending, strange, and sinister stories full of tension between the supernatural and psychological. Within the audiobook, Braum’s multi-dimensional characters face dark underworlds and strange experiences that illuminate the human condition and world (we think) we know. Occult detectives, cursed fur coats, a treasure hunt in an abandoned mental institution, and sharks learning to hunt on land are among the scares awaiting listeners.

A satirical romp through the lives of 20-something queer ne'er-do-wells in Wales. Caroline and her Dom live out their normal lives among the poverty, alcoholics, and street preachers of Swansea. But when Dom and his straight roommate fall in love - a passionate, secret, nonsexual love - their lives are transformed into a queer chaos. The battle between preachers and drag queens, skinheads and sex workers, boyfriend and girlfriend, is set to change the city forever in an inventive story that embraces queer life today.

Outside an isolated cabin, winter fog caresses spruce trees. Inside, two men, lovers, have enacted a plan of revenge, kidnapping the handsome son of the man who wronged one of them. Al, the accomplice, has stalked Rob for weeks, and his infatuation for the young man has grown deeper than he ever anticipated.

Even the worst of us need someone to come home to. And Jacob Mallory is the worst of all. Jake, a thrill-seeking psychopathic serial killer, has lived under the radar for years, operating within the city of New York, making kill after kill and emboldened by his lack of capture. But Jake has one big surprise coming his way. When he gets a call from the hospital to pick up a vulnerable patient, one who claims that Jake is his emergency contact, he feels like he's won the lottery. But is there more to Nathan McGuire than meets the eye?

This is an audiobook of men and monsters who find themselves captivated by one another in the night. With the taste of skin and sweat and, yes, blood, on their lips, kisses that are pained and painful, and bodies left to cool on the sheets like spent seed. Twelve stories that feature vampires and their victims indulging in libidos and mortidos. In New Orleans, an old flame becomes a vampire's new meal. A new student at a boarding school discovers that the local urban legend is hovering outside his window and eager to come inside.

The speculative shines bright in the dark with these stories by Matthew Bright: A boy with a secret begins work at a strange library housing all the books never written; Dorian Gray's love of beauty struggles in the face of AIDS-era San Francisco and the Castro; the tomb of the empress is adrift in space and hungry for the concubines aboard her; two men in an old film finally realize that they are trapped, but still they seek the means for finally declaring their love for each other. 

In Jeff Mann's collection, the sweaty essence of masculinity imbues each verse - whether the poet is offering his take on Grendel, a sumptuous meal in a New Orleans fine restaurant, or evoking his childhood in Appalachia. Folklore and food and fraught coupling are his inspiration, with which he spins desires into words for the ear.

Nineteen-year-old Jake Margate has had terminal leukemia for five years and is ready to let go, but his mother has other ideas. She's found a rogue doctor pursuing radical treatments and takes her son to a remote institute where he does seem to get better...at first. But he can't find his pulse. When the treatment begins to fail in strange ways, just as Jake begins to fall for a boy who is another of patient at the clinic, Jake realizes he's been turned into something truly horrible.

Acres of Perhaps collects acclaimed and thrilling fiction writer Will Ludwigsen's recent and most heartfelt stories; these are tales that delve into what crime means, alternative history, whether a person could live a different life than the one of the moment, what humanity can do about the big and small evils of the world...as well as inspired serial killers, haunted presidents, cursed lead figurines, and a weird late-night '60s television show that meant much more to the fabric of reality than it let on. These stories are the collision of imaginative and brutal realism.

Mirna Fowler believes she has been cheated in life, growing up in a broken home alone with a drunken and gambling-addicted father. Now she works at a small hair salon in Reno, doing her best to survive while she saves money for school and hoping to get a degree that will take her places. But in the wake of her father's death, Mirna inherits his extravagant debt, an amount of money she can never repay. As her fractured world begins to crumble, the search for the truth sets her on a path where life hangs on her every move. 

Manhattan, 1962. Frederick Bailey is a quiet, cultured, closeted architect reluctantly drawn into the effort to save Pennsylvania Station from being demolished. But when he meets Curt, a vibrant, immature gay activist more than half his age, he is overtaken by passions he hasn't felt in years, putting everything he cares about - his friends, his family, his career and reputation - at risk. As the elegant old train station is dismantled piece by piece to make way for the crass new Madison Square Garden sports arena, Frederick must undergo a reckoning he has dreaded all his life.

Few Texans believe the notorious gunman, John Wesley Hardin, who has killed more than 30 men over a 10-year period, will ever be captured; but on a fall day in 1878, he enters the Huntsville prison to serve a 25-year sentence for murder. Witnessing the arrival is convict Garland Quick who, though he's sworn to never again love a desperado, is immediately taken with the handsome 25-year-old killer.

The year is 1967, and Tim Halladay has graduated William & Mary, looking forward to studying drama at Yale, when he finds himself drafted into the United States Army. His college education makes him an object of ridicule and suspicion among the other members of C Company - Charlie Company. Of course, he has to hide his homosexuality. Tom Baker's newest novel is an honest portrayal of a young man fearful of his secret being discovered, at a time when seeking out the comfort of another man's touch could mean arrest, imprisonment, and a disgraceful court martial.

Scott Beach manages to get into bed with his literary hero, and doesn't want to get out. Abruptly dismissed following their first heated encounter, the 28-year old San Francisco writer goes on to engineer a second round some days later, and it is there that Lucian Paul Sperring, 58-year-old famed man of letters, warns him away: ''Don't mistake this for intimacy, Scott. It's fucking and I mean to keep it that way.'' A relationship nevertheless ensues but entirely on Sperring's terms.