Lush Life: A Novel
by Richard Price
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 other: hipster bartenders who tell people they’re really writers, homeboys from housing projects named after the Jewish immigrants who have long left the neighborhood, and cops, cops, cops, circling the streets looking for a collar, disappearing into their cases as their own lives go to ruin. [More]
Storyteller
by Amy Thomson, ACE
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. [More]
A Brother’s Price
by Wen Spencer, Roc
Wen Spencer has always given us great science fiction: compelling characters, interesting backgrounds, compelling stories. In the four books of her Ukiah, Oregon series - spanning just four months in the character’s life - she showed us a band of heros pitted against an evil alien empire bent on taking over Earth and wiping out all life as we know it, right under our noses today, unnoticed by the general population. Among her heros are gays, lesbians, Native Americans, and some pretty mean biker dudes - all pretty rare in the field of science fiction literature. (Alien Taste, Tainted Trail, and Bitter Waters, reviewed in Lifeline Alternative Newsmagazine, January 2004; and Dog Warrior, not reviewed.) [More]
The Deal
by Timothy J. Lambert and Becky Cochrane, Alyson Publications
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 [More]
There Came Two Angels
by Julia Lieber, Alyson Publications
A certain conservative former Senator from North Carolina is discovered in a motel room with a dead naked young man, rumored to be his lover in the gay press. Loy Lombard and her partner Sam MacLean are hired to clear the senator and put the blame where it belongs, on the radical homosexual agenda. Too bad, because Loy is as big a dyke as you can find and she isn’t going to put any blame anywhere it doesn’t belong.
Loy and Sam are veteran sleuths, having honed their skills on the big city police force as homicide detectives. They dive into the mystery of the murder, namely, if the [More]
