title: Fresh Men: New Voices in Gay Fiction
author: Edmund White
description: Twenty stories by up-and-coming gay male writers offer vibrant takes on themes ranging from coming out to unrequited obsession. The anthology opens with Vestal McIntyre's "ONJ.com," which follows a mean-spirited freelancer's manipulative relationship with a female boss. Philip Huang contributes a lyrical, poignant portrait of a young woman's sad life ("American Widow"), while Patrick Ryan's "Ground Control" is a brilliant coming-of-age yarn about the bittersweet yearnings of a boy and his older classmate in the 1980s. The best discoveries include Scott Pomfret's "Chicken," a moving portrait of the tense intimacy between an aging gay man and a teenage hitchhiker with "runaway eyes"; Jorge Ignacio Cortinas's engaging, atmospheric "His Five-Year Sentence," about a young Latino shoplifter's life in northern California; and Kevin Reardon's delicately droll office opera "Teamwork." Hearts both young and old soar with ecstasy and are consumed with longing in these irresistible tales. In the book's foreword, White notes that many feel gay fiction has "run its course." This excellent collection offers proof positive to the contrary. <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
zlib_text: EDMUND WHITE
  
   _A Boy’s Own Story_
  
  With an introduction by
  
  ALAN HOLLINGHURST
  
  PICADOR CLASSIC
  
   _ **Introduction**_
  
   _A Boy’s Own Story_ , first published in 1982, is both a masterpiece in the
  literature of adolescence and a pivotal book in the history of gay writing,
  opening up the landscape of teenage homosexuality with revelatory frankness.
  ‘What if’, its narrator wonders, ‘I could write about my life exactly as it
  was? What if I could show it in all its density and tedium and its concealed
  passion, never divined or expressed?’ The ‘realism’ of the nineteenth-century
  fiction he devours seems to him a kind of fantasy, creating a ‘parallel life’,
  ‘tinglingly far-fetched’. Could there be a new realism, which faithfully
  depicted the inner and outer worlds he actually lived in? In the Midwest of
  the 1950s the growing-up of a young gay man is a vulnerable, marginal, barely
  visible thing, riven by confusion, self-hatred and doubt. Edmund White’s
  novel, doing justice to all this confusio