Classic Literature
| Outhouse East Library | 1 / 6 | |||
| Cover | Details | Summary | ||
 | Corydon | First published nearly one hundred years ago, Andre Gide's masterpiece, translated from the original French by Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Howard, draws from the disciplines of biology, philosophy, and history to support the author s assertion that homosexuality is a natural human trait. At the time of his death in 1951, having won the Nobel Prize in Literature only four years prior, Andre Gide was considered one of the most important literary minds of the twentieth century. In "Corydon," initially released anonymously in installments between 1911 and 1920, Gide speaks his most subversive and provocative truth. Citing myriad examples that span thousands of years, Gide's Socratic dialogues argue that homosexuality is natural in fact, far more so than the social construct of exclusive heterosexuality, the act of systematically banning or ostracizing same-sex relationships."Corydon," named for the pederast character in Virgil's "Eclogues," caused its author all kinds of trouble, accordi... | ||
| Andre Gide | ||||
| 1985 | ||||
| Classic, Fiction, Gay, History, Philosophy | ||||
| Book#: CSLT001 | ||||
 | Teleny, or The Reverse of the Medal | The prose of this homosexual love story recounts the progress of the obsessive passion felt by Camille Des Grieux for Rene Teleny. The atmosphere of Paris lends a claustrophobic feeling to the love that dare not speak its name. | ||
| Oscar Wilde | ||||
| 1995 | ||||
| Classic, Fiction, Gay | ||||
| Book#: CSLT002 | ||||
 | Going to Meet the Man | "There's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it." The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their head above water. It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of pouring his life into an inanimate instrument. It may be the brittle piety of a father who can never forgive his son for his illegitimacy. Or it may be the screen of bigotry that a redneck deputy has raised to blunt the awful childhood memory of the day his parents took him to watch a black man being murdered by a gleeful mob. By turns haunting, heartbreaking, and horrifying--and informed throughout by Baldwin's uncanny knowledge of the wounds racism has left in both its victims and its perpetrators--Going to Meet the Man is a major work by one of our most important writers. | ||
| James Baldwin | ||||
| 1965 | ||||
| BEM, Classic, Fiction | ||||
| Book#: CSLT003 | ||||
 | Breakfast at Tiffany's | It's New York in the 1940s, where the martinis flow from cocktail hour till breakfast at Tiffany's. And nice girls don't, except, of course, for Holly Golightly: glittering socialite traveller, generally upwards, sometimes sideways and once in a while - down. Pursued by to Salvatore 'Sally' Tomato, the Mafia sugar-daddy doing life in Sing Sing and 'Rusty' Trawler, the blue-chinned, cuff-shooting millionaire man about women about town, Holly is a fragile eyeful of tawny hair and turned-up nose, a heart-breaker, a perplexer, a traveller, a tease. She is irrepressibly 'top banana in the shock deparment', and one of the shining flowers of American fiction. | ||
| Truman Capote | ||||
| 1961 | ||||
| Classic, Fiction | ||||
| Book#: CSLT004 | ||||
| Created by Booknizer - www.booknizer.com | ||||
| Outhouse East Library | 2 / 6 | |||
| Cover | Details | Summary | ||
 | The First and Last | Two stories by Truman Capote, an early one about a girl in New York and his last story, also set in New York, demonstrate the author's movement from magical lyricism to world-weariness and cynicism. The stories mark the beginning and end of the writer's creative life. | ||
| Truman Capote | ||||
| 1995 | ||||
| Classic, Fiction | ||||
| Book#: CSLT005 | ||||
 | Utz | Utz collects Meissen porcelain with a passion. His collection, which he has protected and enlarged through both World War II and Czechoslovakia's years of Stalinism, numbers more than 1,000 pieces, all crammed into his two-room Prague flat. Utz is allowed to leave the country each year, and although he has considered defection, he always returns. He cannot take his precious collection with him, but he cannot leave it, either. And so Utz is as much owned by his porcelain as it is owned by him, as much of a prisoner of the collection as of the Communist state. | ||
| Bruce Chatwin | ||||
| 1989 | ||||
| Classic, Fiction | ||||
| Book#: CSLT006 | ||||
 | Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings | No other writer has so scandalized proper society as the Marquis de Sade, but despite the deliberate destruction of over three-quarters of his work, Sade remains a major figure in the history of ideas. His influence on some of the greatest minds of the last century—from Baudelaire and Swinburne to Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky and Kafka—is indisputable. This volume contains Philosophy in the Bedroom, a major novel that presents the clearest summation of his political philosophy; Eugénie de Franval, a novella widely considered to be a masterpiece of eighteenth-century French literature; and the only authentic and complete American edition of his most famous work, Justine. This literary portrait of Sade is completed by one of his earliest philosophical efforts, Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man, a selection of his letters, a fifty-page chronology of his life, two important essays on Sade, and a bibliography of his work. | ||
| Marquis De Sade | ||||
| 1991 | ||||
| Classic, Fiction, Philosophy, Politics | ||||
| Book#: CSLT007 | ||||
 | The 120 Days of Sodom | The 120 Days of Sodom is Sade's masterpiece. A still unsurpassed catalogue of sexual aberrations and the first systematic exploration of the psychopathology of sex, it was written during Sade's imprissonment and then lost after the storming of the Bastille in 1789. Later rediscovered, the manuscript remained unpublished until 1936 and is now introduced by Simone de Beauvoir's landmark essay, "Must we burn Sade?" Unique in its enduring capacity to shock and provoke The 120 Days of Sodom must stand as one of the most controversial books ever written. | ||
| Marquis Sade | ||||
| 1989 | ||||
| Classic, Fiction, Sexuality | ||||
| Book#: CSLT008 | ||||
 | The Longest Journey | The Longest Journey is the story of Rickie, a sensitive and intelligent young man with a certain amount of literary talent and a modest fortune, who sets out from Cambridge with the intention of writing. His stories are not successful and in order to marry the beautiful but shallow Agnes he agrees to abandon his writing and become a schoolmaster at a second-rate public school. This abandonment of personal and real values for those of the world leads him gradually into a living death of conformity and spiritual hypocrisy. | ||
| E. M. Forster | ||||
| 1989 | ||||
| Classic, Fiction | ||||
| Book#: CSLT009 | ||||
| Created by Booknizer - www.booknizer.com | ||||
| Outhouse East Library | 3 / 6 | |||
| Cover | Details | Summary | ||
 | A Room With a View | In this brilliant piece of social comedy Forster is concerned with one of his favourite themes: the "undeveloped heart" of the English middle classes, who are here represented by a group of tourists and expatriates in Florence. The English abroad are observed with a sharp ironic eye, but one of them, the young and unaffected Lucy Honeychurch, is also drawn with great sympathy. In her relationship with her dismal cousin Charlotte, with the unconventional Emersons and - the scene transferred to England - with her supercilious fiance, Lucy is torn between lingering Victorian properties, social and sexual, and the spontaneous promptings of her heart ("an undeveloped heart, not a cold one"). Thus there are hidden depths of meaning in this sunniest and most readable of Forster's novels. This edition includes Forster's light-hearted sequel, "A View Without a Room". | ||
| E. M. Forster | ||||
| 1990 | ||||
| Classic, Fiction | ||||
| Book#: CSLT010 | ||||
 | Carol | A chance encounter between two lonely women leads to a passionate romance in this lesbian cult classic. Therese, a struggling young sales clerk, and Carol, a homemaker in the midst of a bitter divorce, abandon their oppressive daily routines for the freedom of the open road, where their love can blossom. But their newly discovered bliss is shattered when Carol is forced to choose between her child and her lover. | ||
| Patricia Highsmith | ||||
| 1990 | ||||
| Classic, Fiction, Lesbian, Romance | ||||
| Book#: CSLT011 | ||||
 | The Talented Mr. Ripley | Tom Ripley is struggling to stay one step ahead of his creditors, and the law, when an unexpected acquaintance offers him a free trip to Europe and a chance to start over. Ripley wants money, success and the good life and he's willing to kill for it, when his new-found happiness in threatened, his response is as swift as it is shocking. | ||
| Patricia Highsmith | ||||
| 1999 | ||||
| Classic, Fiction | ||||
| Book#: CSLT012 | ||||
 | Against Nature | A wildly original fin-de-siecle novel, Against Nature contains only one character. Des Esseintes is a decadent, ailing aristocrat who retreats to an isolated villa where he indulges his taste for luxury and excess. Veering between nervous exitability and debilitating ennui, he gluts his aesthetic appetites with classical literature and art, exotic jewels (with which he fatally encrusts the shell of his tortoise), rich perfumes and a kaleidoscope of sensual experiences. | ||
| J. K. Huysmans | ||||
| 1959 | ||||
| Classic, Fiction | ||||
| Book#: CSLT013 | ||||
| Created by Booknizer - www.booknizer.com | ||||
| Outhouse East Library | 4 / 6 | |||
| Cover | Details | Summary | ||
 | In the Purely Pagan Sense | John Lehmann's first novel for many years tells the story of a young and happy homosexual emerging in the 1920s to enjoy, in the purely pagan sense, all that the sensual world has to offer. In these confessions, Jack Marlowe starts off as a golden youth with golden connections. His progress from private to public school and university, leads him gracefully into the arms of the Bloomsbury Group. Soon, his pursuit of sexuality lures him to Europe, to the Berlin of Mr. Norris, the Vienna of lederhosen, and then back to London's blitz where anything goes in the black-out and under the bombers. Behind the sensual narrative there is also an accurate picture of between-war Europe. The mandarins of London's intelligentsia are not all they seem to be; under the frenzied travesties of Berlin lies the terror of Nazism; and, after the Anschluss, gaiety dies in Vienna. But Jack Marlowe never abandons his hope of a deeper relationship than the frank pursuit of sexual pleasure implies, and some of t... | ||
| John Lehmann | ||||
| 1976 | ||||
| Classic, Fiction, Gay | ||||
| Book#: CSLT014 | ||||
 | The Magic Mountain | Young, naive and imprassionable, Hans Castorp arrives at a sanatorium high in the Swiss alps to find himself surrounded by exponents of widely differing political and philosophical attitudes. Amid sickness and decay, he is forced to explore the meaning of love and death, and the relationship of one to the other. As he does so, the pattern that emerges from his discussions with his companions, and from his own musings, becomes a symbol og the forces below - forces that would culminate in the First World War and the destruction of the old order. | ||
| Thomas Mann | ||||
| 1996 | ||||
| Classic, Fiction | ||||
| Book#: CSLT015 | ||||
 | Death in Venice; Tristan; Tonio Kroger | Death in Venice tells how Gustave von Aschenbach, a writer utterly absorbed in his work, arrives in Venice as the result of a "youthfully ardent thirst for distant scenes", and meets here a young boy by whose beauty he becomes obsessed. His pitiful pursuit of the object of his affection and its inevitable and pathetic climax are told here with the particular skill the author has for this shorter form of fiction. The same skill is evident in Tristan and Tonio Kroger. The action of Tristan takes place in a sanatorium, and, as in his long novel The Magic Mountain, the author brilliantly portrays the uncertain emotions of people who are forced to live in such places. The theme of Tonio Kroger is that of the artist striving to conform to the pattern of everyday existence. | ||
| Thomas Mann | ||||
| 1928 | ||||
| Classic, Fiction, Gay | ||||
| Book#: CSLT016 | ||||
 | Of Human Bondage | The first and most autobiographical of Maugham's masterpieces. It is the story of Philip Carey, an orphan eager for life, love and adventure. After a few months of studying in Heidelberg, and a brief spell in Paris as a would-be artist, he settles in London to train as a doctor where he meets Mildred, the loud but irresistible waitress with whom he plunges into a tortured and masochistic affair. | ||
| W. Somerset Maugham | ||||
| 1945 | ||||
| BDSM, Classic, Fiction | ||||
| Book#: CSLT017 | ||||
 | The Moon and Sixpence | Based on the life of Paul Gauguin, The Moon and Sixpence is Maugham's ode to the powerful forces behind creative genius. Charles Strickland is a staid baker, a man of wealth and privilege. He is also a man possessed of an unquenchable desire to create art. As Strickland pursues his artistic vision, he leaves London for Paris and Tahiti, and in his quest makes sacrifices that leaves the lives of those closest to him in tatters. Through Maugham's sympathetic eye Strickland's tortured and cruel soul becomes a symbol of the blessing and the curse of transcendent artistic genius, and the cost in human lives it sometimes demands. | ||
| W. Somerset Maugham | ||||
| 1944 | ||||
| Classic, Fiction | ||||
| Book#: CSLT018 | ||||
| Created by Booknizer - www.booknizer.com | ||||
| Outhouse East Library | 5 / 6 | |||
| Cover | Details | Summary | ||
 | The Painted Veil | Set in England and Hong Kong in the 1920s, The Painted Veil is the story of the beautiful but love-starved Kitty Fane. When her husband discoveres her adulterous affair, he forces her to accompany him to the heart of cholera epidemic. Stripped of the British society of her youth and the small but effective society she fought so har to attain in Hong Kong, she is compelled by her awakening conscience to reassess her live and learn how to love. The Painted Veil is a beautifully written affirmation of the human capacity to grow, to change, and to forgive. | ||
| W. Somerset Maugham | ||||
| 1952 | ||||
| Classic, Fiction | ||||
| Book#: CSLT019 | ||||
 | Strange Brother | The year is 1927, and up in Harlem the joints are jumpin' with the sounds of the Jazz Age. In the dazzling commotion of the Magnolia Club, June Westbrook and Mark Thornton meet for the first time to embark on a brief yet intense friendship. A fasionable socialite, June is drawn to Harlem in search of the exotic, only to encounter a people in touch with their emotions in a way she can only imagine. For Mark, his black friends offer him a temporary and comforting respite from the alienation of his "shadow world" - the world of homosexuality. Through June's friendship and infectious appetite for life, Mark begins to reveal his true self. But as the oppressive heat of a New York summer wears on, his new-found identity gradually closes in on him. | ||
| Blair Niles | ||||
| 1991 | ||||
| BEM, Classic, Fiction, Gay | ||||
| Book#: CSLT020 | ||||
 | When the Going Was Good | Wit and adventure in four continents. Experiences from Evelyn Waugh's pre-war travel books which gave him the ideas for such novels as Scoop and Black Mischief. | ||
| Evelyn Waugh | ||||
| 1951 | ||||
| Autobiography, Classic, Travel | ||||
| Book#: CSLT021 | ||||
 | Put Out More Flags | What happened to the characters of Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies when the war broke out? Put Out More Flags shows them adjusting to the changing social patterns of the times. Some of them play a valorous part; others, like the scapegrace Basil Seal, disclose their incorrigible habit of self-preservation in all circumstances. Basil's contribution to the war effort involves the use of his peculiar talents in such spheres of opportunity as the Ministry of Information and an obscure section of Military Security - adventures which incite Waugh to another pungent satire upon the coteries of Mayfair. | ||
| Evelyn Waugh | ||||
| 1943 | ||||
| Classic, Fiction | ||||
| Book#: CSLT022 | ||||
 | Brideshead Revisited | Many of the best English novels are portraits of families. In Brideshead Revisited Waugh narrates the fortunes of the accomplished but eccentric family of Lord Marchmain in a social panorama that ranges from Oxford to Venice. His dissection of the moral infirmities of "society" is as sharp and candid as it was in Decline and Fall or Vile Bodies; but in this novel, the longest and most ambitious of his novels, he also reveals a deep concern and sympathy for the dilemma of the individual. | ||
| Evelyn Waugh | ||||
| 1951 | ||||
| Classic, Fiction | ||||
| Book#: CSLT023 | ||||
| Created by Booknizer - www.booknizer.com | ||||
| Outhouse East Library | 6 / 6 | |||
| Cover | Details | Summary | ||
 | Complete Works of Oscar Wilde | Includes all of Oscar Wilde's stories, plays, poems, essays and letters. | ||
| Oscar Wilde | ||||
| 1976 | ||||
| Classic, Essays, Fiction, Poetry, Theatre/Play | ||||
| Book#: CSLT024 | ||||
 | The Picture of Dorian Gray | The wish uttered by Dorian Gray as he gazes on his portrait forms the basis of the plot of this brilliant and disturbing story of a gilded and spoilt hedonist who, Faust-like, is willing to sell his soul for his beauty. | ||
| Oscar Wilde | ||||
| 1949 | ||||
| Classic, Fiction | ||||
| Book#: CSLT025 | ||||
| Created by Booknizer - www.booknizer.com | ||||
