During World War II, a gay navy sailor works undercover to catch Nazi spies, in this "fast-moving" novel from the author of Gods and Monsters ( Publishers Weekly).During shore leave in New York, Seaman Second Class Hank Fayette, a Texas country boy in the big city, finds himself visiting a gay brothel, where he is swiftly arrested during a raid. Facing the prospect of a dishonorable discharge—or worse—he is given another option: Return to the brot...

Seventeen-year-old Joel can't be gay if he's straightAfter four years of living with relatives in Switzerland, seventeen-year-old Joel Scherzenlieb finds himself in the United States for the summer, working at a Boy Scout camp. There, he meets nineteen-year-old Corey Cobbett, a fellow counselor who's the only person Joel wants to be friends with. Soon, Joel's sarcastic, distant CIA father shows up and whisks him away to live with his mother, grandmother, and older s...

Four novels dealing with a broad range of gay experience—from the "gifted" author of Gods and Monsters, the basis for the Academy Award–winning film ( The Advocate).Whether Christopher Bram is writing about the director of Frankenstein in Gods and Monsters or the characters in the four novels collected here—a sailor who goes undercover in a gay brothel to catch Nazis, a teen coming into his sexual awakening, a group of Manhattani...

A gripping thriller about contemporary gay politicsRalph Eckhart, an unassuming bookstore manager in the East Village, meets Bill O'Connor online and they agree to get together during Ralph's weekend visit to Washington, DC. The two start a heated, long-distance sexual relationship. But Ralph discovers that Bill is a closeted Republican journalist, whose new book trashes liberal women in Washington—including Ralph's speechwriter friend, Nancy—and angrily breaks off ...

One has to look no further than the audiences hungry for the narratives served up by Downton Abbey or Wolf Hall to know that the lure of the past is as seductive as ever. But incorporating historical events and figures into a shapely narrative is no simple task. The acclaimed novelist Christopher Bram examines how writers as disparate as Gabriel García Márquez, David McCullough, Toni Morrison, Leo Tolstoy, and many others have employed history in their work.Unique...

Lives of the Circus Animals is a brilliant new comedy about New York theater people: actors, writers, personal assistants, and a drama critic for the New York Times. They are male, female, straight, gay, in love with their work or in love with each other, and one of them, British star Henry Lewse, "the Hamlet of his generation," is famous.Award-winning novelist Christopher Bram gives us ten days and nights in this small-town world in the heart of a big city, an en...

A group of worldly New Yorkers inherit a friend's last loverA year after the AIDS-related death of filmmaker Clarence Laird, known to friends as Angel Clare, his young boyfriend, Michael, is still in deep mourning. Clarence's older, sophisticated friends—male and female, gay and straight—find themselves the custodians of Michael, a callow kid they never liked much to begin with. What follows is a dark, intimate comedy about real grief and false grief, misunderstand...

The first collection of nonfiction from the author Tony Kushner calls "one of the best novelists writing in the world today"Over a thirty-year period, novelist Christopher Bram witnessed, and lived through, the powerful experiences of coming out, the AIDS epidemic, gay marriage, and the social changes that have occurred in lower Manhattan. From the title piece, which maps the state of gay fiction, to "A Body in Books," about the gay books that changed the author's ...

A series of discrete episodes among friends provide snapshots of one gay man's life. There are parties, concerts, dinners with everyday life – and death – interwoven in the rich story-telling. An actress, a painter, a set designer, a writer – all sweating and surviving in Manhattan, all scoring their first successes. Part autobiography and part documentary, artfully written, it details the lives of these creative people. Young and professional, they know there is more to life than money. T...

A novel about the renowned film director of 1931's Frankenstein , basis for the Academy Award-winning film starring Sir Ian McKellen and Brendan Fraser.1957, Los Angeles. James Whale, the once-famous director of such classics as Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, is living in retirement, haunted by his past. Rescuing him from his too-vivid imagination is his gardener, a handsome ex-marine. The frien...

Christopher Bram tells the story of Augustus Fitzwilliam Boyd, alias Dr. August, a clairvoyant pianist who communes with ghosts, and who finds meaning in his life through a strange love triangle with a righteous ex-slave and nervous white governess. Spanning the years between the Civil War and the early 1920's, this riveting and ambitious historical novel displays the immense talents of a prodigious, highly esteemed author working at the height of his powers.