Award-winning novelist Trebor Healey depicts San Francisco in the 1980s and '90s in poetic prose that is both ribald and poignant, and a crossing into the American West that is dreamy, mythic, and visionary. When troubled twenty-one-year-old Seamus Blake meets the strong and self-possessed Jimmy (just arrived in San Francisco by bicycle from his hometown in Buffalo, New York), he feels his life may finally be taking a turn for the better. But the ensuing romance proves short-lived as Jimmy dies of an AIDS-related illness. The grieving Seamus is obliged to keep a promise to Jimmy: "Take me back the way I came." And so Seamus sets out by bicycle on a picaresque journey with the ashes, hoping to bring them back to Buffalo. He meets truck drivers, waitresses, college kids, farmers, ranchers, Marines, and other travelers--each one giving him a new perspective on his own life and on Jimmy's death. When he meets and becomes involved with a young Native American man whose mother has recently died, Seamus's grief and his story become universal and redemptive.

A Horse Named Sorrow

Literature & Fiction

Healey, Trebor

United States

University of Wisconsin Press

Lambda Literary Award-winner and two-time recipient of the Ferro-Grumley Award for his novels A Horse Named Sorrow and Through It Came Bright Colors, Trebor Healey's latest short stories confront the dangers of populism and the growing world refugee crisis. Predominately set in Latin America and the western U.S., these tales confront immigration and cultural upheaval, history, politics, and the profound displacement of modern lives. From a fantastical contemporary reworking of the political life of Evita Peron, reimagined with a gay man in the starring role, to the story of an abandoned building full of ghosts in the center of Mexico City and a love affair straddling the U.S.-Mexico border, these stories engage the imagination and suggest other ways of seeing in a world overburdened by history. These are stories of hard-won redemption and transformation - a widower who finds meaning adopting refugee children, a painter who in losing everything reconnects to his son, a nun victimized and haunted by state terror, and a peripatetic gay man who in utter despair and fatigue finally comes home to bond with his dying father. In Healey's skilled hands, there is a flicker of hope in the hopeless, a way forward in the pathless wood, and a bridge - even though it be rickety and swaying - across even the most harrowing chasm. "Trebor Healey has shown us in these utterly original stories how the English-speaking part of the Americas confronts the Spanish-speaking part. In The Orchid, he has written a masterful exploration of the inner politics of Argentina. This is a wise, brilliant story that will be read for many years to come!"--Edmund White, author of A Boy's Own Story

Falling

Sweet Son of Pan is a collection of erotic poems, born of crushes, love affairs, fantasies, dreams, and real experiences with men from around the world. These poems are written in a mood of devotion, a praise through language of the sweetest garden we enter as physical beings. They are a response to the sadness that is often a consequence of sex; the fear that so unnecessarily surrounds it; the disrespect that is visited upon it. They are wishes; elegies for our lost brothers--and for the parts of our selves that our lost; parts we rediscover. They are a reaffirmation of sexual freedom and the wisdom that can be gained from the journey along that path--glimpses of paradise, our oneness and timelessness--and if we are lucky, of a small horned creature with cloven hooves who reminds us we came here only to share, and to share joyfully.

Sweet Son of Pan

Poetry

Suspect Thoughts Press

Through It Came Bright Colors

Through It Came Bright Colors is the story of Neill Cullane, a closeted, conflicted 21-year-old who lives in two worlds, light-years and a short drive of his beat-up VW bug apart. At home, he's the dutiful son of Frank and Grace, and devoted brother to Peter, whose battle with a cruel, disfiguring cancer pulls the Cullane family together, however reluctantly. But in the shadows of the San Francisco underworld, Neill finds release with his secret lover Vince Malone, a beautiful junkie/philosopher/thief whose burning desire for truth lights the path Neill always knew he'd travel. Through Vince, Neill learns about honesty and love and finds the courage to confront his family in the face of tragedy and loss.

Harrington Park Pr

Trebor HealeyThe story of Neill Cullane, a closeted, conflicted 21 year-old that lives in two worlds that seem light-years apart, but that he travels between in a beaten-up VW car. At home, he's the dutiful son of Frank and Grace, and devoted brother to Peter, whose battle with a cruel, disfiguring cancer pulls the Cu

Short Stories & Anthologies

A Perfect Scar and Other Stories is a whimsical, sly, and slightly crazy collection of short stories from award-winning novelist, poet, and songwriter Trebor Healey. These 12 tales cover a lot of ground, including AIDS, aging, death, eroticism, tattoos, and multiculturalism—all told with humor, insight, and Healey's rich, lyrical touch. This sometimes poignant, sometimes erotic assortment of fauns, punks, cowboy dykes, old men with swollen prostates, young men with criminal records, and gangsters doomed by their own beauty and grace are bound together by folly, fate, and passion in their search to find some semblance of peace in the world.

A Perfect Scar and Other Stories

One morning Gilberto Rubio wakes up with a five o’clock shadow. Puberty. But why are his legs getting so furry? And what are these little horn nubs pushing out of his scalp? What’s that nub of a tail that’s making it so hard to sit on anything but couches? His peers begin to treat him like a freak, while his anxious mother Lupita crosses herself and worries about his eternal soul and what might be happening to it. When his mere presence begins to stir the hormones of anyone nearby and the pregnancy rate suddenly skyrockets at Buenaventura High, Gilberto panics and, hopping aboard his trusty skateboard, vanishes into Hollywood before hitchhiking out of Los Angeles to find the mysterious stranger he met online, who just might have some answers. So begins an urban fantasy, a new fairy tale about lust and faith, Los Angeles and devotion, as only award-winning author Trebor Healey can evoke, in the pages of Faun.

Faun

Literary

Lethe Press

Winner of the Ferro-Grumley Award--twice!--author Trebor Healey's work thoroughly captures the poignant and erotic life of gay men. In Eros &amp; Dust, his newest short story collection, Healey sets loose an unforgettable cast of characters. There s the meth-addled youth bent on redemption by returning to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a mischievous imp who finds himself emotionally drawn to his victims, and a circus clown fleeing his Mexican trapeze artist lover by escaping to Argentina. If that's not enough, you'll find an elusive faun of the Oaxacan highlands, a traveler expiring from dengue fever and a revisionist Jack Kerouac, along with troubled chickenhawks and ambivalent lovers trying to work it out in chatrooms, Chile, a junkyard and a puppet theater. ''The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls,'' said Pablo Picasso. Healey reminds us that we should then moisturize with daily helpings of lust and sensuality.

Eros and Dust: Stories

Sweet Son of Pan is a collection of erotic poems, born of crushes, love affairs, fantasies, dreams, and real experiences with men from around the world. These poems are written in a mood of devotion, a praise through language of the sweetest garden we enter as physical beings. They are a response to the sadness that is often a consequence of sex; the fear that so unnecessarily surrounds it; the disrespect that is visited upon it. They are wishes; elegies for our lost brothers and for the parts of ourselves that our lost; parts we rediscover. They are a reaffirmation of sexual freedom and the wisdom that can be gained from the journey along that path glimpses of paradise, our oneness and timelessness and if we are lucky, of a small horned creature with cloven hooves who reminds us we came here only to share, and to share joyfully.

History & Criticism

Queer Mojo

Requeered Tales

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Healey, Trebor. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Healey, Trebor

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Healey, Trebor. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

A Horse Named Sorrow

Falling

Sweet Son of Pan

Through It Came Bright Colors

Through It Came Bright Colors

A Perfect Scar and Other Stories

Faun

Eros and Dust: Stories

Sweet Son of Pan

Through It Came Bright Colors