From the blurb:At a meeting of republican sympathisers in London, Brian Botsford, a young middle-class writer and Cambridge graduate, meets Edward Phelan, an idealistic, self-educated London Underground worker. They share a mutual attraction. Across the divisions of class they begin an affair in ...
An intimate portrait of life in a small rural town in Tuscany recounting David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell's restoration of a dilapidated 1950's farmhouse in southern Tuscany and the process by which they became initiated into a part of Italian life that foreigners rarely see. The pleasures of the ...
I was pleasantly surprised by Equal Affections, having had no expectations at all: I was unfamiliar with the author, picked the 24-year old book off a sale table somewhere, and the cover graphics and text stirred only mild interest. But I quickly found it extremely well written, with characters ...
A delightful collection. I get serious short story burnout when I try reading too many in a row and I've been reading a lot of them lately, but not one of these made my eyes glaze over or my mouth snarl into a cynical complaint about contemporary fiction. Each of these stories was interesting, fr...
So, you know how people talk about a golden age of short story writing that took place during the 1980s? I often fantasize about that era, and try to find the writers who were part of it. This book was written in 1990, but Leavitt's first collection came out in 1984, and I wonder if he's part o...
Apartment in Athens concerns an unusual triangular relationship. In this story about a Greek couple in Nazi-occupied Athens who are forced to share their quarters with a German officer, Wescott stages a drama of accommodation and rejection, resistance and compulsion. Apartment in Athens depicts a...
Dança de Família é uma colectânea de contos, que David Leavitt escreveu aos 22 anos. O elo de ligação entre eles é a família e os sentimentos que nela habitam: o amor, o desamor, a união, a desunião..."cada família abriga um estranho no seu seio."Território - A homossexualidade. A aceitação e com...
I really enjoyed reading this collection, and it reinforced my faith in David Leavitt as a writer. The first novella, The Term Paper Artist, is one of those stories that's held up by its premise. It has an interesting take on gay for pay. These guys are gay for research papers. Once the premise h...
The brilliant new novel from one of our most respected writers--his most ambitious and accessible to date.On a January morning in 1913, G. H. Hardy--eccentric, charismatic and, at thirty-seven, already considered the greatest British mathematician of his age--receives in the mail a mysterious env...
Re-read (bought & read it in Florence in 2006 when I was staying there for a summer course) of this charming little ‘refreshing antidote to the average city guide’ as the cover says. Not always fairly judged though, just because it is not a city guide and you will be disappointed if that is what ...
The Body of Jonah Boyd , a novel by David Leavitt, published in 2004, is a story of the Wright family in Wellspring, California told by Ernest Wright’s secretary, Janet (Denny) Denham. It centers around a Thanksgiving meal in 1969. Ernest Wright is a psychology professor at the local college in ...
”It was horrible, really, what I was feeling, the sense I had that I was running a terrible risk every minute of my life - risking my family, my career - but not being able to help it; somehow just not being able to help it. I was thinking every day how I had to change my life, how I couldn’t go ...
This richly illustrated history not only provided a constant source of reference, but pointed the way to other texts that proved to be of value, most notably Monica Stirling’s The Fine and the Wicked: The Life and Times of Ouida (Gollancz, 1957) and Eric Linklater’s The Art of Adventure (Macmilla...
“Thanks for meeting me here,” he said, taking my hand. “I’ve been wanting to see these peacocks. And now we’ve only got a few days.” “Not just to see the peacocks,” I said. He opened his mouth; seemed, for a moment, to make a mental calculation; said nothing. We entered the castle grounds. I am t...
THINGS STARTED LOOKING UP. My editor moved from Viking Penguin to Houghton Mifflin, which decided to bring out the paperback of While England Sleeps, as well as my new novel. “So it’s a done deal,” my agent said on the phone. “Oh, and by the way, I’m putting down a March of ninety-six delivery. I...
This is how we came to meet Olimpia Orsini. An interior designer of some repute in Rome, Olimpia also owned a little shop that she refused to call a shop—it was her “studio,” she insisted—on Via del Boschetto. (She referred to herself not as a “designer” but as an “interior,” which, considered to...
This wasn't really such a tragedy, Joseph tried to convince himself. After all, she'd had a good life, had lived to be thirteen—old for a dachshund. Still, as he hailed a cab outside Dr. Wincote's office, a sensation of hollowness rose up in his stomach. His breathing got choppy. Safe inside the ...