Allen Barnett saw this collection of short stories published in 1991, the same year as his death due to AIDS-related illness at the age of 36. The Body and Its Dangers and Other Stories won a Ferro-Grumley Award and a Lambda Literary Award and is widely regarded as a classic of American literature."Allen Barnett knew how to plait the somber and the sardonic. His work is as light as it is dark, as funny as it is heart-breaking. I met him only once at a gay literary conference in San...

New York City, 1995: Harry Charity is a sensitive young loner haunted by a disastrous affair when he meets Jay Bishop, an outgoing poet and former Marine. Propelled by a shared fascination with the unfettered lives of Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation, the two are irresistibly drawn together, even as Jay's girlfriend, Zahra, senses something deeper developing.Reveling in their discovery of the legendary scroll manuscript of Kerouac's On the Road in the vaults of the New York Pub...