Contemporary Gay Romances

Contemporary Gay Romances is the third collection of short fiction by legendary novelist and memoirist, Felice Picano (The Lure, Like People in History, Ambidextrous). It is also his most diverse in terms of the times, places, themes, characters and situations he writes about. Filled with the unexpected, the true, and the amazing, Contemporary Gay Romances moves with ease from gas-lit, upper class London, to a future, climate-altered Bay Area; from semi-rural Florida to Southern California beaches, to an extrasolar planet where people have surprising existences. His characters range from ordinary American suburban housewives to extraordinary children, from grieving young geologists and memory-haunted middle aged men, to British Midlands soccer stars and 22nd Century war heroes. Picano subtitled this collection of stylish, unique, and moving works ?Tragic, Comic, Mystic & Horrific,” and they are all that and more. The ten tales include prize winners as well as stories published here for the first time, and are as different from any standard ?romances” as you can get, but they will linger in the mind and memory.

Felice Picano is the author of more than twenty-five books of poetry, fiction, memoirs, nonfiction, and plays. His work has been translated into many languages and several of his titles have been national and international bestsellers. He is considered a founder of modern gay literature along with the other members of the Violet Quill. Picano also began and operated the SeaHorse Press and Gay Presses of New York for fifteen years. His first novel was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Since then he’s been nominated for and/or won dozens of literary honors, most recently a Lambda Literary Pioneer Award. Recent work includes a collection of stories, Tales: From a Distant Planet, and a history/memoir of early gay life in New York, Art & Sex in Greenwich Village. Picano's latest colleciton of memoirs, True Stories: Protraits From My Past was published in 2011, and, with Prof. Lazaro Lima, Picano co-edited Ambientes: an anthology of GLBT Latina/o writing.