News from Lethe Press

The blog Out In Print has this to say about Lethe's recently released Pumpkin Teeth, by Tom Cardamone:

"It’s not just the variety or breadth of ideas that fascinates me in Pumpkin Teeth. What I keep coming back to again and again is their execution. Entertaining ideas and plots are a dime a dozen (well, maybe a quarter a half-dozen), but Cardamone’s writing is so exquisitely right for each one that I swallowed this book whole in the space of a few hours and had to go back and read more carefully to better admire the style. Ray Bradbury (one of my heroes) came to mind, and Cardamone is as adept at blending beauty and oddity as Bradbury ever has been."

Read the rest of the review here.

Rainbow Reviews really likes Wilde Stories 2009.

Reviews by Jessewave gives a five-star review to The Phoenix by Ruth Sims!

Loving Someone Gay, by Don Clark, Ph.D.

For more than three decades, clinical psychologist, Don Clark, has been speaking to the hearts and minds of gay people, their families, friends, teachers and helpers in the many editions of Loving Someone Gay. With compassion he has promoted communication across generations as well as revealing a path of understanding and reconciliation for parents, siblings, husbands and wives—as well as among religious leaders, teachers, librarians, legislators, judges, and law enforcement agencies. Most important he has provided vital insight into the psychodynamics and sociology of individuals, the gay men and lesbians who have been and continue to be misunderstood and abused in societies around the world.
 
He has said, “In this age of global misunderstanding in which we see old habits of prejudice and bigotry coming into question finally, the world cries out for communication and empathy. The time has come for any person who believes she or he is rational to offer a helping hand to a gay sister or brother, here or there, known or unknown. Previously unquestioned rules are changing. No person is free to dare to be exactly who she or he is until that person is willing to offer understanding, respect and affection to the gay person who yearns only for that same freedom.”
 
With this latest updated edition of his famous book, Dr. Clark shines a clear light into our future in the twenty-first century.


Russian River Rat by Mark Abramson

The third book in the Beach Reading series by San Francisco Chronicle best-selling author Mark Abramson.
Tim Snow is sure he's finally found the perfect man, a handsome guy with a successful greenhouse business by the Russian River. With his beloved Aunt Ruth now moved to San Francisco, his life should be worry-free. But San Francisco Chronicle's best-selling author Mark Abramson can't stop with telling lively mysteries--Tim starts having troubling dreams; a drowned body haunts his boyfriend, who may be less than perfect; and there are men from both their pasts who might be deadly.

The Edge online paper covered the Lethe Press event at Housing Working Bookstore/Cafe in New York City. Around 50+ folks turned out to hear authors Jameson Currier, Sean Meriwether and Tom Cardamone read from their recently released books. All the books (Currier's The Haunted Heart, Meriwether's The Silent Hustler, and Cardamone's Pumpkin Teeth) sold well and the proceeds went to charity. (Housing Works supports HIV/AIDS-affected individuals in the New York area and nationally).

Craig Gidney, Tom Cardamone, Sean Meriwether, Steve Berman



Book display



Jim Currier reads



Sean reads




Tom Cardamone, Jameson Currier, Steve Berman

Photos courtesy of Leo Lai

Bibliophile Stalker's Charles Tan reviews Sleepy Beauty, Indeed, an anthology of lesbian fairytales edited by JoSelle Vanderhooft.

Review

Reviews by Jesse reviewed erotica collection Ready To Serve by James Buchanan

Events

Join Lethe authors Tom Cardamone, Jameson Currier, and Sean Meriwether for a Halloween reading for charity in NYC city.  Rumor has it that Lethe Press publisher Steve Berman and assistant editor Craig Laurance Gidney will at the event, as well.  More information is here.

Books

Below is the cover for The Silent Hustler, a collection by Sean Meriwether.

Jerry Wheeler of the Out In Print blog recently interviewed Lethe Press honcho Steve Berman.

The Bookwenches reviewed Joseph De Marco's Murder on Camac!

Icarus:  The Magazine of Gay Speculative Fiction needs book reviewers ASAP.  500-1500 word reviews  of gay speculative fiction.  Email:  clgidney@gmail.com if interested.

Lethe Press publisher and writer (and editor) Steve Berman was interviewed by the Brazilian magazine Aguarras.  You can read both the Portuguese and English versions.

The online zine Camp interviewed Lethe author Wayne Courtois.

Out in Print reviewed The Haunted Heart by Jameson Currier.

Charles Tan of Bibliophile Stalker reviewed Wilde Stories 2009

Events

Lethe authors Jameson Currier, Tom Cardamone and Sean Meriwether will be reading on Thursday October 29 at the Housing Works Bookstore Cafe in New York.  The event starts at 7:00 PM and the address is126 Crosby Street in Manhattan.

Sneak Peek at the Cover of Best Gay Stories 2009

Jameson Currier's collection of ghost stories, The Haunted Heart, was announced in Locus Magazine--the trade paper of speculative fiction.

The Rest of Our Lives, by Dan Stone, was reviewed by the blog Reviews by Jessewave.

Our Halloween 2009 issue of Icarus offers a science-fiction tale set in a futuristic San Francisco by Alex Jeffers, a vampire paying a late visit to a conservative Republican senator in Jeff Mann's tale, and Stoker-Award winner Lee Thomas has an excerpt from his forthcoming short story collection; there's poetry about the perfect undead husband by Chad Helder; Paul Tremblay antagonizes... no, he interviews Lee Thomas about his recent work; and, of course, there are cartoons, snarky as well as wise reviews, gossip, and so much more. This issue of Icarus is better than a slice of pumpkin pie.

 

Blogger/Author P.A. Brown  reviews Murder on Camac by Joseph DeMarco.

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OutInPrint reviews The First Risk by Charles Jensen.

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Wilde Stories 2009
The Year's Best Gay Speculative Fiction ed. by Steve Berman

 The latest edition of Wilde Stories, edited by Steve Berman--who was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for last year's Wilde Stories 2008--promises readers a range of gay-themed fiction published the prior year, tales that ranges from the chilling (Lee Thomas' ''I'm Your Violence'') to the surreal (Sven Davisson's ''Dim Star Descried'') to the fantastical (''Firooz and His Brother'' by Alex Jeffers). These are imaginative stories that seek to press new boundaries of loneliness, loss and love, between men and monster (and those men who happen to be monsters).

 

 

 

Blog Rick R. Reed Reality interviews Joe De Marco, author of Murder on Camac.

Shadow Man by Melissa Scott, the first book in the new Paragons of Queer Speculative Fiction series, is now available for pre-order on Amazon.

The Haunted Heart and Other Tales
by Jameson Currier

Haunted? Or blessed?
Ghosts? Or guardian angels?
Twelve new stories of gay men and the memories that haunt them.

A circuit boy stays at a haunted hotel. An actor recounts a grisly murder in the English countryside. A gay parent unravels a mysterious souvenir. A journalist chases a story through the streets of Amsterdam. An artist grapples with his muse. A musician is inspired by the spirit of a sailor.

Jameson Currier modernizes the traditional ghost story with gay lovers, loners, activists, and addicts, blending history and contemporary issues of the gay community with the unexpected of the supernatural.


Japanese Dreams: Fictions, Fantasies & Fairytales
edited by Sean Wallace

Japanese Dreams takes the reader to the islands of fire and smoke - where shape-shifters, demons and lovers all populate a landscape blossoming with story. Imaginative contributions by such well-known writers of fantasy as Steve Berman, Eugie Foster, Jay Lake, Yoon Ha Lee, Robert Joseph Levy, Lisa Mantchev, Richard Parks, Ekaterina Sedia, Erzebet YellowBoy, and more, all offer us a glimpse of a silken sleeve or the red fur of the fox as she slips between the rushes, daring us to follow.


Queer Hauntings:  True Stories of Gay and Lesbian Ghosts
by Ken Summers

In reading tales of ghosts and hauntings, themes of fear and rejection recur with much regularity. Lonely souls seek acknowledgement from the living so that their lives are not forgotten. This terror of abandonment is shared by the many gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered individuals deciding whether to share their truth with friends and relatives. No one, living or deceased, wants to feel invisible and unloved.

Yet some ghosts are invisible. The best-known ghost stories and haunted places revolve around heterosexual entities. Gowned ladies eternally wait for their male lovers, happily-married couples and their children loiter in their favorite homes. Many other tales surround ambiguous specters, demonic possessions, and unearthly animals. Feminine men and butch women are not often to be found, and when a haunting displays homosexual characteristics, it is often rejected, scoffed at, or ignored by paranormal investigators.

In this book, you will find some of the many pink phantoms and lavender apparitions which have fallen through the cracks. From the urban streets of New Orleans and London to the isolated countryside of Zanzibar and the United States, Queer Paranormal lifts the veil separating sexual orientation from supernatural activity and explores the other side of the metaphysical closet. Ghosts of legendary celebrities mingle with ordinary individuals. Horrific murders, forgotten history, and strange characters emerge once more as their stories are retold.

Today sees the release of Maryland-based poet Charles Jensen's book, The First Risk.

In four extended sequences, The First Risk confronts the murder of Matthew Shepard and the myth of Venus and Adonis through the eyes of Italian Renaissance painter Luca Cambiaso; the eccentric women of Pedro Almodovar's All About My Mother and their search for authenticity; the nature of love and obsession in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and the pain and confusion of loss; and ''The Strange Case of Maribel Dixon,'' the compelling novella-in-verse of a physicist in search of his lost wife, haunted by a phantom voice that may or may not be hers...

Here is one of Jensen's poem, reprinted with kind permission of the author:


I was love when I entered the bar
shivering in my thin t-shirt and ripped jeans
and I was love when I left that place, tugged along at the wrist
as though tied, with a man I did not know.

I was love there in the morning
when our sour kisses bore the peat of rotten leaves,
fallen October leaves. And it was love that we kissed anyway, not knowing each other’s names.

I was love in that bed
and I was love in the hall and down the stairs and into the freezing rain.

I was love with hands punched deep
into the pockets of a coat.
I was love coated in frozen rain.

Back home, I was love stripped of the cigarette-stung shirt, love pulling the stiff jeans from my legs.
I dried my hair and I was love.

It was October. What did I know of love that year,
shuddering in my nervous skin. Miles away, the boy was lashed to a fence and shivering.

Where that place turned red and the ground soaked through
with what he was, I was love.

What did I know of love then
but that it wasn’t enough.

Bibliophile Stalker (aka Charles Tan) gave a superlative review to the first issue of Icarus.

Edge published a great review of Murder on Camac, by Joseph R. G. DeMarco.

The blog Out In Print reviews  of the modern classic about bear subculture Bears on Bears, by Ron Suresha.  From our imprint Bear Bones Books.


Here is a sneak peak of the cover of The First Risk, a collection of poetry by Charles Jensen.  The book releases next month.

Poet Charles Jensen, whose Lethe Press debut The First Risk will be published this fall, was interviewed by The Collagist.

Beth Bernobich, whose untitled short story collection will be published the Lethe early next year, has released Ars Memoriae, an alternate history novella, from PS Publishing.

Out In Print reviews A REPORT FROM WINTER by Wayne Courtois.