Showing results by publisher "Lethe Press" in All Categories

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.

The phrase "you are what you eat" is taken to heart; these are stories of men facing strange appetites within their own physicality, within a lover or, perhaps, a stranger's hungers. A young athlete attends an exclusive wrestling camp, but some of the campers are more focused on the unwelcome boys they claim lurk inside their bellies. A fixit man on a mission to retrieve a runaway finds himself forced into impersonating a pulp hero by her captor.

In intense, lyrical language, Jeff Mann's short stories give us an array of tormented characters: adulterous lovers, a kidnapper and his handsome victim, the sadistic ghost of a Confederate soldier, a yearning forestry student, an eager masochist, and a hairy biker. These tales explore the sex and psychology of BDSM and of bear culture, and most are set in Mann's native Appalachia, an area often mythologized as a place where the wilderness within converges with the wilderness without. A Lambda Literary Award winner for Best Gay Erotica!

Betrayed by his own skin into a helplessly eroticized state, he becomes a captive of a bizarre torture camp where men practice extreme tickling. After several near-death experiences, he stumbles across a hiding place where several desperate men plot an escape while taking physical solace in each other. Sweatily detailed in its depiction of men driven over the edge, this nightmarish novel is a bondage epic, a horror comic, and a totally original speculation on the nature of time and consciousness.

Set in the post-Napoleonic years of the 1820s, Standish is a tale of two men - one discovering his sexuality and the other struggling to overcome his traumatic past. Ambrose Standish, a studious and fragile young man, has dreams of regaining the great house his grandfather lost in a card game.

In this companion volume to his critically acclaimed, Lambda Literary Award-winning book Gay Spirituality, noted author Toby Johnson further explicates his visionary stance that gay people's nature as outsiders gives them a uniquely powerful perspective on the nature of God and religion. By living outside gender norms, gay people are more open to seeing across boundaries of gender and gain access to a less dualistic outlook on the nature of life.

Josh Moore lives with his family on the "wrong side" of Hamilton, a gritty industrial city in Southwestern Ontario. As a young boy, Josh plots an escape for a better life far from the steel mills that lined the bay. But fate has other plans and Josh discovers his adult life in Toronto is just as fraught with as many insecurities and missteps as his youth, and he soon learns that no matter how far away he might run, he will never be able to leave his hometown behind.

Young Toby spends his days exploring the backwoods surrounding his UK country home. His imagination not only supplies adventure but also the exciting promise of lustful embraces and kisses with the handsome field hand. When Toby's mother, a nurse, brings home a sickly yet handsome youth, Cymon, to recuperate, Toby finds himself drawn to the older boy.

Set during the height of World War II, The German examines the effect a series of ritualistic murders has on a small, Texas community. A killer preys on the young men of Barnard, Texas, leaving cryptic notes written in German. As the panic builds all eyes turn toward a quiet man with secrets of his own, who is trying to escape a violent past.

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.

Harry George Alexander Bircham: Not necessarily an infamous name in the annals of gay fictional characters - yet. But listeners of Erastes' newest historical novel should prepare themselves for many pages of suspenseful intrigue as the miscreant Bircham, a cultured man of Wildean excesses and humours, will do anything it takes to bend Fate to his will. And that sinister will is to keep the affections and attentions of another English young man.

In his new collection, Bitter Waters, Brenchley has assembled stories queer and weird: a man with morbidly sensitive hearing sets sail to chart dangerous rocks called the Silences; a ship's chandler from among his shadowed stock gives an old friend a compass that guides through Hell rather than point north; a eunuch and his dwarf lover leave the Sultan's harem to visit the baths of a city poisoned by magic; a youth who climbed the echelons of power thanks to his looks and guile finds being on the losing side of war has forced his to return to his sordid, early life.

Cody Montrose is about to lose his virginity during a one-night (more accurately a one-hour) stand in a seedy motel when the hookup is interrupted by three men who abduct him...to the year 2060. His captors reveal that mankind will soon be extinct because of the mutated HIV virus. But perhaps a risky plan to send the ideal test subject back in time to California, to the year 1983 where the deadly strain first occurred, might work. Cody finds himself asked to impersonate Lance, a big-d--ked, blond porn star of the era.

The autobiographical essays in Edge offer insight into the passions of acclaimed author Jeff Mann. These memories, insightful as they are endearing, range from his boyhood obsession with the gothic allure of Dark Shadows to the doubt and pain of being a Southerner, and so at the edge of the gay community, and the appeal of leather bars and bear culture. Mann also visits gay meccas in these essays - the resorts of Key West, Provincetown, and Rehoboth Beach.

Germany, 1922: Tabner and Emrick are young ne'er do wells hiding from Paragraph 175, legislation over a half-century old that forbids homosexual activity. Emrick sleeps through the days so he can enjoy the cabaret culture. Tabner is his semi-willing partner-in-crime, though of late he has become obsessed with his pen pal, Florence Balcombe, the widow of Bram Stoker. When F.W. Murnau's infamous film Nosferatu is about to premier, both Tabner and Emrick find themselves beguiled, yet distressed, by a strange older man met at the cabaret.

It is 1914 and The Great War is underway. When the call to arms comes, Nicholas Southwell won't be found hanging back. It's a pity he can't be so decisive when it comes to letting his estate manager Paul Haskell know what he feels before he has to leave for the front line. In the trenches Nicholas meets a fellow officer, Phillip Taylor, who takes him into the unclaimed territory of physical love. Which one will he choose, if he's allowed the choice?

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?

Scotsman Derek Maclaine has fallen in love with his adopted West Virginia home and its burly native son, Matt Taylor. But a local mining company's recent efforts to destroy the land spell an end to all that Matt holds dear. Derek happens to be an immortal, a creature of the night, a vampire who does not know satiety. After many years without equal, Derek believes stopping a corporation of weak men will be easy. But Alpha Coal employs more than thugs: they are literally demonic.

In Jewish Gentle and Other Stories of Gay-Jewish Living, Daniel M. Jaffe explores various aspects of gay-Jewish life: coming out to self and family; (re)defining one's relationship to tradition and faith; surviving child abuse and teenage sexual identity angst; experiencing the adult joys and heartbreaks of dating, of forming relationships, and of losing them; coping with HIV/AIDS; considering parenting; and dealing with old age.

Are you prepared to enter acclaimed author Hal Duncan's world of scruffians and scamps and sodomites? Beware, for it is filled with the gay pirate gods of Love and Death, immortal scoundrels, and young men who find themselves forced to become villains. But who amongst us does not adore a gamin antihero? These fantastical tales from the fringes of an imaginative realm of supernatural fairies and human fey will captivate the listener.