City of Night is an explosive first novel by John Rechy, originally published in 1963. It boldly introduces a new era of gay fiction, with an inventive narrative that delves into the urban underworld of male prostitution.
The story follows a hustling "Youngman" on a restless search for self-knowledge, as he navigates through the neon-lit life on the edge. From El Paso to Times Square, Pershing Square to the French Quarter, the narrator's journey offers an unforgettable look at a life lived on the fringe.
Rechy's portrayal of the world of hustlers, drag queens, and their denizens is unflinching and deeply personal. His prose is characterized by a rare and beautiful recklessness, capturing the essence of a time and place with candor and understanding.
In The Sunlight Dialogues, John Gardner's vision of America in the turbulent 1960s embraces an unconventional cast of conventional citizens in the small rural town of Batavia, New York. Sheriff Fred Clumly is trying desperately to unravel mysteries surrounding a disorderly, nameless drifter called "The Sunlight Man," who has been jailed for painting the word "LOVE" across two lanes of traffic, and who is later suspected of murder.
The men battle over morality, freedom, and their opposing notions of justice, leading each to find his own state of grace. Their conflict is mirrored in the community of middlebrow politicians and their church-going wives, Native Americans, working-class immigrants, farmers, soldiers, petty thieves, and even centenarian sisters too stubborn to die.
Gardner's alchemy is existential: from the most raw, vulnerable, and conflicting characters in the American melting pot, he transmutes common denominators of human isolation and longing. With unnerving suspense, his acute ear for American speech, and permeated by his deep-rooted belief in morality, this expansive, sprawling, and ambitious novel is John Gardner's masterpiece.
Trout Fishing in America / The Pill vs. the Springhill Mine Disaster / In Watermelon Sugar is an omnibus edition of three counterculture classics by Richard Brautigan that embody the spirit of the 1960s.
Trout Fishing in America is by turns a hilarious, playful, and melancholy novel that wanders from San Francisco through America's rural waterways.
In Watermelon Sugar expresses the mood of a new generation, revealing death as a place where people travel the length of their dreams, rejecting violence and hate.
The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster is a collection of nearly 100 poems, first published in 1968.
Paris in the spring of 1968. The city is beginning to emerge from hibernation, and an obscure spirit of social and political renewal is in the air. Yet Théo, his twin sister Isabelle, and Matthew, an American student they have befriended, think only of immersing themselves in another, addictive form of hibernation: moviegoing at the Cinémathèque Française.
Night after night, they take their place beside their fellow cinephiles in the very front row of the stalls and feast insatiably off the images that flicker across the vast white screen. Denied their nightly 'fix' when the French government suddenly orders the Cinémathèque's closure, Théo, Isabelle, and Matthew gradually withdraw into a hermetically sealed world of their own creation.
An airless universe of obsessive private games, ordeals, humiliations, and sexual jousting which finds them shedding their clothes and their inhibitions with equal abandon. A vertiginous free fall interrupted only, and tragically, when the real world outside their shuttered apartment succeeds at last in encroaching on their delirium.
The study of a triangular relationship whose perverse eroticism contrives nevertheless to conserve its own bruised purity, brilliant in its narrative invention and startling in its imagery, The Dreamers belongs to the romantic French tradition of Les Enfants Terribles and Le Grand Meaulnes and resembles no other work in recent British fiction.