Showing titles in Coming of Age

Teenage Justin's summer is suddenly made even hotter by the appearance of a mysterious and very handsome young artist wearing a leopard print bathing suit that sparks his imagination and his heart. Can his dreams of the enticing stranger become reality? Written in a vivid and poetic style, colorfully describes this story of a gay youth's infatuation, fantasy, longing and love.

This is not a hair book. It's a dark comedy of a spiritual misfit, a child with a dream born into the wrong town. Religious cults, corporate cults, and insane clients - Francis can't catch a break. Francis has observed his own inability to fit in since birth, and his decision to be a professional cosmetologist only exacerbates his innate oddness.

Written in an urban vernacular that’s electrifying and intimate, On the Come Up introduces a heroine whose voice is irrepressible, dynamic, and unstintingly honest. Thirteen-year-old AnnMarie Walker dreams of a world beyond Far Rockaway, where the sway of the neighborhood keeps her tied to old ideas about success. While attending a school for pregnant teens, AnnMarie comes across a flyer advertising movie auditions in Manhattan. Astonishingly, improbably, and four months before she’s due to give birth - she lands a lead role.

In this collection, Catherine Lundoff, D. L. King, Cheyenne Blue, Kristina Wright, Jean Roberta, and 15 other writers offer up no-holds-barred, all-holds-hot tales of the highs and lows and kinky twists of first times. Coeds acting out for Girls Gone Wild get even wilder once the cameraman goes home. A lonely businesswoman discovers how far and hard her young chauffeur can drive her. Butch buddies find secret desires racing out of control. A summer job building trails sparks trailblazing into all-new territory.

Not every story has a happy ending. Since her brother's death, eight-year-old Egg Murakami has been living day-to-day on the family ostrich farm near Bittercreek, discovering life to be an ever-perplexing condition. Mama Murakami has curled up inside a bottle, and Papa has exiled himself to the barn with the birds. Big sister Kathy tells stories to Egg so that the world might not seem so awful.

Meet the hapless Jeremy: a man in his late 50s, he scrapes together a living in Paris by writing soft-core pornography under the saucy guise of "Nathalie Cray". When his all-but-estranged sister tells him their father is on his deathbed, Jeremy reluctantly travels back to his parental home in the depths of the English countryside. Confronted with a life that he had always been eager to escape, his return marks the start of an emotionally fraught journey into the family's checkered past.

Exhausted by dead-end forays in the gay dating scene, surrounded constantly by friends but deeply lonely in New York City, and drifting into academic abyss, 20-something graduate student Richard has plenty of sources of anxiety. But at the forefront is his crippling writer’s block, which threatens daily to derail his graduate funding and leave Richard poor, directionless, and desperately single. Enter Anne: his brilliant classmate who offers to “help” Richard write his papers in exchange for his company, despite Richard’s fairly obvious sexual orientation.

Conrad Aybinder is a boy with a secret; 16 and ready for anything. A chemistry genius, he has spent the summer on an independent-study project with his favorite teacher, Sammy Tampari. Sammy is also Conrad’s first love. But the first day of senior year, the students are informed that Mr. Tampari is dead. Rumors suggest an overdose. How can it be? Drugs are for unhappy people, Conrad is sure, not for people who have fallen in love.

Unsinkable and wrecked by grief, motherless and aimless and looking for connection, Helen Dedleder is a girl with a gift she doesn't want to use and a pack of friends who are all just helping each other get by. So cut off from the rest of the world that even the internet is blocked (never mind traffic in and out), Rosary, California, is run by evangelicals but was named by Catholics. It’s a town on very formal relations with its neighbors, one that boasts an oil refinery as well as a fairly sizable population of teenagers.

Lorraine Tyler is the only queer person in Bend, Minnesota. Or, at least, that’s what it feels like when the local church preaches so sternly against homosexuality. Which is why, she’s fighting so hard to win the McGerber scholarship - her ticket out of Bend -even though her biggest competition is her twin sister Becky. And even though she’s got no real hope - not with the scholarship’s morality clause and that one time she kissed the preacher’s daughter.

1978: In a snowy Pennsylvania forest, Reid, a studious high school distance runner meets Everett, a privileged and capricious charmer. As their lives become intertwined, Reid is swept up in Everett’s adventurous world. When a near-fatal accident changes both their lives, Reid and Everett’s determination to keep their love alive faces obstacles of family, time, and distance.

Not every gay teen yearns for fashion and popular culture. Some boys are pure country folk and like the feel of flannel and the smell of the farm. And they're neither lithe nor muscle-bound but stocky boys, the ones who develop hairy chests, arms, and faces years earlier than their peers. One such seventeen-year-old is Travis Ferrell, shy among most of the other kids at school, but proud of his West Virginia roots. He has not yet admitted his passion for handsome guys - and his idea of what handsome is and what handsome does is not much different from him.

When Ahmed's parents send him to a residential treatment center known as Serenity Ridge, it's with one goal: to "fix" their son, at any cost. But eleven months of abuse and overmedication leave him desperate to escape. And when the opportunity comes, Ahmed runs away to San Francisco. There, he moves into a secret safe house shared by a group of teens. Until they become independent at eighteen, the housemates hide away from authorities, bound by rules that both protect and frustrate.

Invisible Life is the story of a young man's coming of age. Law school, girlfriends, and career choices were all part of Raymond Tyler's life, but there were other, more terrifying issues for him to confront. Being black was tough enough, but Raymond was becoming more and more conscious of sexual feelings that he knew weren't "right". He was completely committed to Sela, his longtime girlfriend, but his attraction to Kelvin, whom he had met during his last year in law school, had become more than just a friendship.

The art world falls in love with Dixie Stammers when it is discovered that not only are her pots mechanically perfect spheres, they are also identical, despite the fact that they are made entirely by hand, without benefit of a wheel, measuring device, or any other tool. Her teenage son, Judas, is pathologically shy, and retreats into a world of anonymous sexual encounters at a roadside rest area. What he really longs for though is a relationship with one of the boys at the private school he attends.

It’s 2006, and Casey has thrown herself into NYC’s lesbian and trans activist scene—marriage equality marches, L Word-watching parties, BDSM sex clubs, and trans rights protests. Adam tags along, having fun in places he’d never have expected, but he’s surrounded by lesbians, and it seems like the last thing he’ll find is a girlfriend. That is, until he meets Gillian. Adam is soon hopelessly, desperately in love...only there’s just one small problem. Gillian thinks he’s a trans man.

As the healer’s daughter, Malka has seen how the wood’s curse has plagued her village, but the Ozmini Church only comes to collect its tithe, not to listen to heretics with false stories of monsters in the trees. So when a clergy girl wanders too close to the forest and Malka’s mother is accused of her murder, Malka strikes an impossible bargain with a zealot Ozmini priest: bring the monster out and spare her mother from execution.

Andrew is a jock, tall and attractive with eyes you could float away in. Though, despite seeming to have the qualities that would make for a romantic love interest, he's never been in a relationship. Why? Because he's in the closet. Being gay isn't exactly suited to a guy like him. Marred with a tendency to compare himself to others—particularly to his overachieving older brother—and having witnessed a less attractive classmate score the man of his dreams, Andrew figures it may be time to start dating. And shortly after his eighteenth birthday, he resolves to do just that.

It’s the west end of Toronto, the apartments are small, and everybody is twenty-seven and making some kind of art. In the wake of her mother’s death, Sophie pays rent by making stained glass mosaics for rich people and plays house with her childhood friend and sometimes-lover, the beautiful boy Alex. Both are from Newfoundland but move easily in this world of crowded patios and DIY movie shoots. When Sophie meets the glamorous poet Maggie, who is the downtown product of a hundred cool queer bars, she falls into a bewildered infatuation.

Life is meant to be an adventure rich in love & laughter. Eight very different little girls going off on adventures that most children can only dream and imagine. Be it traveling to another world straight out of an RPG game or a Fantasy anime. Or becoming superheroes, protecting their home while struggling to find the balance of a college student. Or going off to discover the urban tales that had been passed down for generations.

Roland Keener is an aging hairstylist who’s lived and worked in Winnipeg all his life. He’s more or less content with the quiet and predictable days he shares with his partner of twenty-five years, Tony. That is, until he hears that Birdy O’Day—washed-up music icon and Roland’s childhood best friend and first love—is playing his first concert in Winnipeg since fleeing decades earlier. Holing up with a scrapbook of news clippings about Birdy, Roland recalls his childhood in the ’60s and his friendship with Birdy until the pair became estranged when Birdy left in pursuit of stardom.

Jade Brown, a twenty-four-year-old first-generation Jamaican woman living in Toronto, must find a way to pick up the pieces and discover who she is following the mysterious death of her twin sister. Grappling with her grief, Jade seeks solace in lovers and friends during an array of hilarious and heartbreaking adventures. As she investigates some of life's most frustrating paradoxes, she holds tight to old friends and her ex-girlfriend, lifelines between past and present.

Eve has a carefully curated online life, works occasionally, and texts constantly with her best friend, Ezra. Basically, she is an archetypal LA millennial. She has also been carrying on a year-long conversation with her deceased friend Miggy over text. But when Ezra goes missing on the anniversary weekend of Miggy's death, Eve feels like her world is shattering. Over a frantic weekend Eve investigates Ezra's disappearance, scouring social media for clues, while drowning her anger and anxiety in drinks, drugs, and spiritual cleansing.

At a time when coming out of the closet is chic, it is certainly not that way for Brad Archer. After a traumatic sexual encounter in high school, Brad, now in college, is having trouble with romantic relationships. He has dates with girls that fail miserably and continues to have horrific nightmares about both his past and the fears for his future.

Genocide. Jellyfish smack. Unrequited love. This is a tale of thirteen mermaid sisters, the last of their kind.

This picture of Devin, alive when she should not be alive, triggers of a journey of grief and discovery as the young woman convinced that she caused Devin's death sets out to discover whether Devin may actually be alive, and whether she can be forgiven. Along the way she steals identities, picking up and discarding the people she may or may not be as she struggles with her guilt, and to come to terms with her own bisexuality. As her sense of self unravels, she meets Calgary hippies, a car thief, and an ice cream loving corpse.

Death. Tragedy. Circumstances. World events. All of these impact everyone in the world, and one often thinks that adults remain on the receiving end. However, it is the middle schoolers and high schoolers who are impacted the most. These are the years and the events that shape everyone into being the person that they become. This is how the human brain, heart, and the entire system works. Within this system are middle-schoolers Jake, Steven, Evan, Justin, Kev, Stacey, and Ellie at Castle Rock Middle School, who have a journey that changed them for good.

Jessica Ann Stark, known as Jess, has lost the love of their life. A non-binary 20-something with a soft spot for girly girls, Jess has finally found the one: Emma Lee. The only problem is that she is dating their best bud, Rick. Watching Rick take Emma Lee from 19-year-old innocent high school dropout to a girl who needs to work "the program" takes its toll on Jess, who, when all is said and done, is left grieving and questioning everything.

Lizzy is your average teenager, not able to take a break from life's bad idea of a joke. Her life is hell, and her parents are the demons of her prison. One bad choice after another leads her to her ultimate demise: uncovering a secret that was hidden from her since birth.

It's a destiny thrown upon her too soon, and one she's not even sure she wants. After killing her uncle, Hyde, and capturing his rebels, Trinity must repair relations between Humans and Angorians. She must find a way to ease their fears and assure them that Angorians will not cause them harm.

A Story of a Boy: Finding Light in the Shadows of Self-Acceptance is a compelling journey through the life of a young man as he navigates self-doubt, societal expectations, and self-discovery. This heartfelt narrative explores the challenges of identity, relationships, and resilience, offering a message of hope and empowerment for those on similar journeys.

When Michael Dawouk is disowned by his Muslim family for being gay, he turns his back on the religion and culture he grew up with. He is forced out onto the street, only to be taken in by a former high school teacher who offers him room and board in exchange for sex. Michael is soon left with nothing to believe in, until he meets Wyatt, a successful Texan businessman who takes him under his wing. But what Michael can’t see is that his mentor is just as lost as he is.

Hamburg, 1977. Julle ist vierzehn Jahre alt. Kurz vor den Sommerferien bekommt er einen neuen Mitschüler, Axel. Sofort ist Julle verliebt. Dass er schwul ist, weiß keiner. Bis auf seine Schwester und seine Mutter vielleicht, Mütter sollen so etwas ahnen. Julle zählt die Stunden, die er Axel kennt, und freundet sich mit ihm an. Zusammen gehen sie ins Freibad, füttern Axels Kaninchen und entdecken eine versteckte, halb abgebrannte Hütte im Wald.

"Aprovéchate de mí" de Xóchitl Lagunes es la novela ganadora del Premio Nacional de Novela Joven José Revueltas 2020. La novela, narrada en primera persona por el protagonista, Santi, cuenta con doce capítulos, todos titulados como canciones de Café Tacuba. Se trata de una novela gay de aprendizaje sobre una primera relación con alguien veinte años mayor. La voz del narrador es verosímil y da cuenta de un mundo, el del extrarradio de la Ciudad de México, con sus propias reglas.

When 79-year-old Arthur Edwards gathers his family together to share some important news, no one is prepared for the bombshell he drops: he's gay, and after a lifetime in the closet, he's finally ready to come out. Arthur's 21-year-old grandson, Teddy, has a secret of his own: he's also gay, and developing serious feelings for his colleague Ben. But Teddy doesn't feel ready to come out yet – especially when Arthur’s announcement causes shockwaves in the family.

Etwas muss sich ändern, aber was wenn die ganze Welt gegen einen scheint? Snehas Abschluss fällt in den Schlund der amerikanischen Rezession, und doch gehört sie zu den Glücklichen. Für ihre erste Stelle zieht sie nach Milwaukee; und obwohl der Job aufreibend ist, eröffnet er ihr unverhoffte Möglichkeiten: Sie kann die Drinks ihrer neuen Freunde bezahlen und ihren Eltern in Indien Geld schicken. Sneha stürzt sich auch ins Dating und verknallt sich bald in die Tänzerin Marina. Doch der Druck ist groß, und bald zeigt sich, dass dieses gute neue Leben auf wackeligen Beinen steht.

Scamming the local perverts out of their social security checks inside of Reuben "the Prince-of-Porn" Sturman's Paris Adult Theater; learning everything there is to know about wholesale drug dealing from two of the biggest street pharmacists in the city; getting mixed up with gay motorcycle gangs or attempted murders out on Lake Erie; and experiencing every puppy-love whore-crush in between. There really were a lot of Drugs and Other Things to Do in Cleveland during the 1980s!