Allen Pasztory, the hearing son of two deaf parents, struggles for a sense of self and family with a view to his Hungarian immigrant heritage, chronic illness, his lover Jeremy, Jeremy's son Toby, and his own nephew, Kit

Safe As Houses: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Jeffers, Alex

United States

Faber&Faber

Working with metaphors of deafness, language, homosexuality and illness, Safe as Houses explores the definition of family that includes but is not limited to blood relations, and a definition of fatherhood apart from or in addition to paternity.

Safe As Houses

Heretic Books

A very special book, featuring in a single volume (under two beautiful covers), two spectacular short novels: "On a world without women, who are the New People?" The New People by Alex Jeffers, set on the watery planet Rahab in the distant future, presents a society where no females have been born for generations and where science has made it possible for men to continue in a single-sex world. But most males there are still born heterosexually oriented. The biological and existential conundrum inherent in this situation eventually answers the question of who the "New People" are and what their agenda is. But in the process of unfolding for the reader the nature of Rahab's society, Jeffers creates beautifully rendered characters and a deeply moving story that will surprise the reader throughout and leave a lasting impression. "A stunning act of betrayal on a deadly world!" Brandon H. Bell's Elegant Threat...On the Demise of Captain Fantomas Patton-Guerrero and Loss of La Amenaza Elegente is a lovely, stirring, startling story focused on a group of far future humans making their living by wrangling the strange fauna of a deadly oceanic moon while facing impending conflict with their Post-Singularity cousins and sectarian strife within their own ranks. Though Bell foreshadows his story's conclusion from the very beginning, he has crafted such engaging characters that one cannot help but hold out hope that somehow disaster will be averted. Together, the two stories form a remarkable duo, the first M-Brane SF Double.

The New People/Elegant Threat: An M-Brane SF Double

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Bell, Brandon H.

Science Fiction

M-Brane SF

Sleep deprivation does funny things to your head. Steeped in the romance of Renaissance Italian literature, Ben Lansing isn’t coping well with the routines of his first post-college job, his daily commute from Providence, Rhode Island, to Boston, the inevitable insomnia and lack of sleep, or the peculiarly vivid dreams when he does manage to sleep. For Ben “wished to be a paladin. He wished to mount Ariosto’s hippogriff and fly to the moon. He wished to sing a Baroque aria of stunning, shocking brilliance, bringing the audience to its feet roaring, ‘Bravo! Bravissimo!’ He wished to run mad for love.” When Ben encounters a lost prince squatting in a derelict South Boston warehouse with his little sister and elder brother, exiles of an imaginary Italy, he resolves to rescue Dario and Dario’s family—and himself. Stumbling from dream to real life and back again, Ben begins a fabulous quest. Amid visions of futures, pasts, strangely altered presents, he encounters mythic personages—raffish bike messenger/artist Neddy, dilettante translator Kenneth, his own mother and father. He falls in and out of love. He witnesses the flight of the hippogriff and the collapses of the New England economy and his parents’ marriage. He discovers what he never knew he was looking for all along. In Deprivation, a novel as real as a fairy tale or romantic Renaissance epic, neither Ben nor the reader can ever feel certain of being awake or dreaming, walking the streets of Boston or the mazy paths of dreamland. Can you separate wish from fulfilment? Do you want to?

Deprivation: or, Benedetto furioso

Contemporary

Lethe Press

Thirteen fantastical tales from the Lambda Literary Award-winning author of The Padişah's Son and the Fox and That Door Is a Mischief - stories that venture into queer and unknown reaches of the imagination.

Not Here, Not Now

Short Stories & Anthologies