The Penguin Book Of Gay Short Stories

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

The diversity - and unity - of gay love and experience in the 20th century is celebrated in this acclaimed anthology, which includes 21 stories from the first edition, together with 15 additional tales. The texts range from the tender unarticulated longings of D.H. Lawrence's A Poem for Friendship to the explicitly sexual.

The heartwarming true story of two penguins who create a nontraditional family. At the penguin house at the Central Park Zoo, two penguins named Roy and Silo were a little bit different from the others. But their desire for a family was the same. And with the help of a kindly zookeeper, Roy and Silo got the chance to welcome a baby penguin of their very own.

In this wide-ranging anthology, 32 women from Britain, continental Europe and the Americas express the depth and complexity of lesbian literature. Including stories about coming-out and cross-dressing, as well as vampire tales, science fiction, parody, and romance, this collection "casts the world in a different light".--The New Republic.

"This anthology, is an exciting mix of the best established names plus an adventurous new wave of gay and bisexual voices from England, Ireland. Scotland and Wales", says Hartnett. "This collection is a far cry from crap melodrama, the usual sentimental nonsense and all that paint by numbers porn that is as wincingly predictable as it is unlikely, and anything but erotic. It's important for writers to embrace their sexuality and lifestyle as completely and honestly as possible and at the same time to forget about it entirely".

This is a collection of gay literary fiction, by men and for men, majoring on new, modern writing, and featuring many stories specially commissioned for this volume.

"A riotous party, " says David Leavitt of this anthology, in which seventeenth-century samurai mingle with twentieth-century Russian emigres and Chinese peasants. As in The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories, writers both gay and straight explore the complicated questions surrounding love and sex between men, homosexual identity, relationships between gay men, their friends, and their families. From Plato to Boccaccio, Marguerite Yourcenar to Reinaldo Arenas, Yukio Mishima to Manuel Puig, these writings reveal an unexpected cultural and historical flexibility of attitudes toward homosexuality.

This collection explores the history and development of the anglophone short story since the beginning of the nineteenth century.