Aaron, fed up with his friends’ complaining about their love lives, comes up with The Deal: They all have until next New Year’s Eve to find true love or stop whining about it. And there will be monthly love sucks parties to let all the whining out, but no whining in between.

That’s a tall order. Miranda sucks the life out of every one of her romances. Can she really find love with a butch punk lesbian drummer? Alexander dabbles with men’s hearts. Will he every get a steady job and a steadier boyfriend? Will Patrick, Aaron’s straight roommate, be able to weather out the changes in his romance with Vivian, who can’t

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It’s been 11 years since Junot Díaz’s critically acclaimed story collection, Drown, landed on bookshelves and from page one of his debut novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, any worries of a sophomore jinx disappear. The titular Oscar is a 300-pound-plus “lovesick ghetto nerd” with zero game (except for Dungeons & Dragons) who cranks out pages of fantasy fiction with the hopes of becoming a Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien. The book is also the story of a multi-generational family curse that courses through the book, leaving troubles and tragedy in its wake. This was the most dynamic, entertaining, and achingly heartfelt novel I’ve read in a long

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No one has a better ear and eye for the American city than Richard Price, and in Lush Lifee, his first novel in five years, he leaves the fictional environs of Dempsy, New Jersey, where Clockers, Freedomland, and Samaritan were set, for a few crowded blocks of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. There’s a crime at the heart of the story, but you don’t read Price for plot. Instead, you listen as he peels apart layers of class and history through the way his characters talk to each

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One of my guilty pleasures is to collect Western pulp fiction paperbacks with homoerotic book covers, along with the campy gay pulp fiction as well. Rarely do the two genres meet; the Westerns never have gay characters, and the early gay pulps often fail in authenticity, with few exceptions.

One author who straddles both genres is Victor J. Banis, whose novel Longhorns will please fans of gay and western fiction. As one of the last products of the sadly defunct Carroll & Graf gay fiction wing, Banis’ latest book gently blends elements of a standard romance, erotica, and traditional Western pulp fiction. It’s like Brokeback Mountain without so much angst.

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Humans have colonized the largely water-covered planet of Thalassa, settling on the many islands which dot its oceans. For centuries, news has traveled and history has been taught by storytellers, itinerants who sail the seas on harsels, which resemble intelligent telepathic whales.

One storyteller, who calls herself Teller, takes a young boy named Samad under her wing. She is very old, and Samad will be her final apprentice. As Samad grows up and travels with Teller, he learns about the world on which he lives and about the harsels which transport them.

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