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Felice Picano (1944 - )
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 Onyx
by
Felice Picano
What is the measure of a man's life? Success?
Love? Friendship. Ray Henriques has them all, and more, but lately
its not enough. But it is not just Ray who is on a quest for
deeper meaning and understanding of life's extraordinary
landscape. For Jesse, Ray's lover of ten years, it is a quest
accelerated by his imminent death from AIDS. And for young married
father of two Mike Tedesco, it is a search for the heart of
masculinity. The sexual exploration which begins when Ray and Mike
meet awakens a restlessness in both men, which resoundingly alters
their future paths. As Ray's life begins to draw him increasingly
into the future, a future without Jesse, he attempts to tether
himself to the here and now with frequent visits to a past where
life's answers seemed simpler and more meaningful. But when
Jesse's fundamentalist Christian mother rolls into town to take
charge of her son's final weeks, he is yanked from his reverie to
face an opponent unlike any he has ever known. Marked by shifting
points of view and Picano's use of humor, descriptive brilliance,
and unexpected revelation, Onyx is a multifaceted
exploration of inner lives, motivation, love, and the sometimes
hollow center beneath a polished surface.
 Book
of Lies by
Felice Picano
Playful, ambitious, and
minutely plotted, Felice Picano's follow-up to his crossover
success, Like
People in History, will appeal to his increasing
readership in much the same way as a box of Belgian chocolates, a
self-indulgent but harmless extravagance. Ross Ohrenstedt, a
resourceful and well-read young academic teaching a single summer
literature course at UCLA, manages to get permission to examine
and catalog the papers of Damon Von Slyke, a member of the
infamous Purple Circle of gay writers active in the 1960s and
1970s (and roughly modeled on Picano's own literary group, the
Violet Quill Club, which includes Andrew Holleran and Edmund
White). Piecing together the various drafts of Von Slyke's many
books, and trying to identify the handwriting in the margins, Ross
eventually stumbles on a fascinating manuscript by an unknown
writer--a man virtually erased from literary history--who seems to
have been intimately connected to all the members of the Purple
Circle. Picano's baroque eye for detail and his invariably rich
and luscious male characters (most of whom speak in complete,
highly articulate sentences that would put Gore Vidal to shame)
set the sometimes silly, but no less enjoyable, tone for this
well-paced academic mystery. --Regina Marler (Amazon.com)
"This entertaining novel satirizes the way
Americans love to categorize, study, and utterly embalm authors
and their subjects in the university system. It is also a
hilarious roman à clef and send-up of a 'movement' in American
writing--‘gay lit,’ with its glitterati of novelists--which
includes some very deft, witty references to real published
authors, including its own." -- --The
Guardian
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From Alyson
Books
Felice Picano is the author of 19 books,
including the best-selling novels Like People in History,
Looking Glass Lives, The Lure, and Eyes as well as the
literary memoirs Ambidextrous, Men Who Loved Me, and A
House on the Ocean, a House on the Bay. He is also the author
with Dr. Charles Silverstein of The New Joy of Gay Sex. He
is the founder of Sea Horse Press, one of the first gay publishing
houses, which later merged with two other publishing houses to
become the Gay Presses of New York. With Andrew Holleran, Robert
Ferro, Edmund White, and George Whitmore, he founded the Violet
Quill Club to promote and increase the visibility of gay authors
and their works. He has won the Ferro-Grumley Award for best gay
novel (Like People in History) and the PEN Syndicated
Fiction Award for short-story. He was a finalist for the Ernest
Hemingway Award and has been nominated for three Lambda Literary
Awards. A native of New York, Felice Picano now lives in Los
Angeles.
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Felice Picano
Excerpt:
Tanya Cull had mentioned on the phone in a final
aside that Berkeley -- though by no means specifically the
Languages Department -- had recently received bomb threats from
nationalists of some Pacific island --an atoll vaguely related to
some financial and scientific interests of the college --
demanding their independence. This explained the surprising
security around Sproull Square, metal detectors at Sather Gate as
well as at each building's entrance, each of which sported a white
armbanded guard, although in the school's tradition, some security
people looked as though only a few days before they'd hawked
nipple rings and tattoos to tourists few yards away on Telegraph
Avenue...
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Names Index:
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