The Penguin Book Of International Gay Writing

"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 of thirty-nine stories celebrates the diversity and unity of gay love and experience in the twentieth century.

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 Penguin Book of Gay Australian Writingis the first anthology devoted solely to a retrospective overview of writing by gay men in this country. In his role as editor, novelist Graeme Aitken has collected together from classic and contemporary sources a selection of short stories, extracts from novels and memoir, essays, letters and poetry. While this landmark volume encompasses over seventy years of Australian writing, it particularly focuses on the past ten eventful years, a period of extraordinary growth and dynamism for gay writing. The book also includes a critical reflection by Michael Hurley, author ofA Guide to Gay and Lesbian Writing in Australia.

Today's most celebrated, prominent, and promising authors of gay fiction in English explore the literary influences and themes of their work in these revealing interviews with Richard Canning. Though the interviews touch upon a wide range of issues—including gay culture, AIDS, politics, art, and activism—what truly distinguishes them is the extent to which Canning encourages the authors to reflect on their writing practices, published work, literary forebears, and their writing peers—gay and straight. Edmund White talks about narrative style and the story behind the cover of A Boy's Own Story. Armistead Maupin discusses his method of writing and how his work has adapted to television. Dennis Cooper thinks about L.A., AIDS, Try, and pop music. Alan Hollinghurst considers structure and point of view in The Folding Star, and why The Swimming-Pool Library is exactly 366 pages long. David Leavitt muses on the identity of the gay reader—and the extent to which that readership defined a tradition. Andrew Holleran wonders how he might have made The Beauty of Men "more forlorn, romantic, lost" by writing in the first person.

Celebrated goldsmith and sculptor of the Italian Renaissance, Benvenuto Cellini (1500-71) fits the conventional image of a Renaissance man: a skillful virtuoso and courtier; an artist who worked in marble, bronze, and gold; and a writer and poet. Using the methodologies of New Historicism, social history, and gender and sexuality studies, this book places Cellini and his cultural production in the context of contemporary discourses about sexuality, law, magic, masculinity, and honor. In his life and literary oeuvre, the notorious artist, rogue, and sodomite aligned himself with the transgressive and oppositional voices of his day.

Queer Italia gathers essays on Italian literature and film, medieval to modern. The volume's chronological organization reflects its intention to define a queer tradition in Italian culture. While fully cognizant of the theoretical risks inherent in trans-historicizing sexuality, the contributors to this volume share an interest in probing the multi-form dynamics of sexual desires in Italian texts through the centuries. The volume aims not to promote the mistaken notion of a single homosexuality through history. Rather, these essays together upset and undo the equally misguided assumption of an omnipresent heterosexuality through time by uncovering the various, complex workings of desire in texts from all periods. Somewhat paradoxically, a kind of queer canon results. These essays open a much-needed critical space in the Italian tradition wherein fixed definitions of sexual identity collapse. Queer Italia is the first and only work of its kind in Italian criticism. As such, it will be of interest to a wide audience of Italianists, medieval to modern, and queer cultural theorists.