David Leavitt

David Leavitt's extraordinary first novel, now reissued in paperback, is a seminal work about family, sexual identity, home, and loss. Set in the 1980s against the backdrop of a swiftly gentrifying Manhattan, The Lost Language of Cranes tells the story of twenty-five-year-old Philip, who realizes he must come out to his parents after falling in love for the first time with a man. Philip's parents are facing their own crisis: pressure from developers and the loss of their longtime home. But the real threat to this family is Philip's father's own struggle with his latent homosexuality, realized only in his Sunday afternoon visits to gay porn theaters. Philip's admission to his parents and his father's hidden life provoke changes that forever alter the landscape of their worlds.

A Novel

The Lost Language of Cranes

Outlines the Bletchley Park mathematician's efforts to launch artificial intelligence innovations, describing his thwarted attempts to gain support for a programmable calculating machine, his contributions to cracking the Nazi Enigma code during World War II, and how the revelation of his homosexuality led to his tragic imprisonment and suicide. Reprint.

The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer (Great Discoveries)

David Leavitt returns with his signature “coolly elegant prose” (O, The Oprah Magazine) to deliver a comedy of manners for the Trump era. It is the Saturday after the 2016 presidential election, and in a plush weekend house in Connecticut, an intimate group of friends, New Yorkers all, has gathered to recover from what they consider the greatest political catastrophe of their lives. They have just sat down to tea when their hostess, Eva Lindquist, proposes a dare. Who among them would be willing to ask Siri how to assassinate Donald Trump? Liberal and like-minded-editors, writers, a decorator, a theater producer, and one financial guy, Eva's husband, Bruce-the friends have come to the countryside in the hope of restoring, away from the news cycle and the post-election delirium, the bubble in which they have grown used to living. Yet with the exception of one brash and obnoxious book editor, none is willing to accept Eva's challenge. Shelter in Place is a novel about house and home, furniture and rooms, safety and freedom and the invidious ways in which political upheaval can undermine even the most seemingly impregnable foundations. Eva is the novel's polestar, a woman who moves through her days accompanied by a roving, carefully curated salon. She's a generous hostess and more than a bit of a control freak, whose obsession with decorating allows Leavitt to treat us to a slyly comic look at the habitués and fetishes of the so-called shelter industry. Yet when, in her avidity to secure shelter for herself, she persuades Bruce to buy a grand if dilapidated apartment in Venice, she unwittingly sets off the chain of events that will propel him, for the first time, to venture outside the bubble and embark on a wholly unexpected love affair. A comic portrait of the months immediately following the 2016 election, Shelter in Place is also a meditation on the unreliable appetites-for love, for power, for freedom-by which both our public and private lives are shaped.

Shelter in Place

As Europe prepares for war during the summer of 1940, two couples - expatriate Americans fleeing Paris and wealthy bohemians beset by the social and sexual anxieties of their class - arrive in Portugal where their lives become inexplicably entwined in unimaginable - and dangerous - ways.

The Two Hotel Francforts

Set against the rise of fascism in 1930s Europe, WHILE ENGLAND SLEEPS tells the story of the love affair between Brian Botsford, an upper-class young writer, and Edward Phelan, an idealistic, self-educated employee of the London Underground and a member of the Communist party. Though by far the better educated of the two Brian is also more callow, convinced that his homosexuality is something he will outgrow. Edward, on the other hand, possesses 'an unproblematic capacity to accept' both Brian and the unorthodox nature of their love for each other - until one day, at the urging of his wealthy aunt Constance, Brian agrees to be set up with a 'suitable' young woman...and soon enough Edward is pushed to the point of crisis. Fleeing, he volunteers to fight in Spain, where he ends up in prison. Brian, responsible for Edward's flight, must pursue him across Europe, into the violent chaos of war.

While England Sleeps

Mark Lindsey Mitchell

A collection of fiction by and about gay men features original stories from Larry Kramer, Edmund White, Christopher Coe, Michael Cunningham, and other writers, and explores the tragedies and triumphs of AIDS

The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories

After young pianist Paul Porterfield engages in a brief affair with aging prodigy Richard Kennington and both return to New York to pursue separate endeavors, they do not see each other again, but their relationship has profound repercussions that neither had expected. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

The Page Turner

E. M. Forster

The love of a young British woman named Lucy Honeychurch for a British expatriate living in Italy is condemned by her stuffy, middle-class guardians, who prefer an eligible man of their own choosing.

A Room with a View

La lingua perduta delle gru

In 1913, the eccentric G. H. Hardy, Britain's leading mathematician, receives a letter from a self-professed mathematical genius, Indian clerk Srinivasa Ramanujan, and sets out to persuade the enigmatic Ramanujan to come to Cambridge.

The Indian Clerk

A Place I've Never Been

"I miei genitori sono gente aperta. Non resteranno annientati dalla notizia" pensa Philip Benjamin, il protagonista di questo romanzo nel momento in cui, a venticinque anni, si appresta a rivelare alla famiglia la propria omosessualità...

The third in the critically acclaimed Writer and the City Series - in which some of the world's finest novelists reveal the secrets of the cities they know best - Florence is a lively account of expatriate life in the 'city of the lily'. Why has Florence always drawn so many English and American visitors? (At the turn of the century, the Anglo-American population numbered more than thirty thousand.) Why have men and women fleeing sex scandals traditionally settled here? What is it about Florence that has made it so fascinating - and so repellent - to artists and writers over the years? Moving fleetly between present and past and exploring characters both real and fictional, Leavitt's narrative limns the history of the foreign colony from its origins in the middle of the nineteenth century until its demise under Mussolini, and considers the appeal of Florence to figures as diverse as Tchaikovsky, E.M. Forster, Ronald Firbank, and Mary McCarthy. Lesser-known episodes in Florentine history - the moving of Michelangelo's David, and the construction of temporary bridges by black American soldiers in the wake of the Second World War - are contrasted with images of Florence today (its vast pizza parlors and tourist culture). Leavitt also examines the city's portrayal in such novels and films as A Room with a View, The Portrait of a Lady and Tea with Mussolini.

A Delicate Case

Florence

Florence, a delicate case

Uma biografia única sobre o homem que inventou o computador: o matemático britânico Alan Turing. Tímido, considerado excêntrico pelos que não o conheciam bem, ele mostrou aos amigos mais próximos humor e sinceridade mesmo com relação à sua homossexualidade. Gênio, concluiu o mestrado e recebeu prêmios por seu trabalho sobre a Teoria das Probabilidades. Ficou famoso pelas pesquisas no campo da inteligência artificial. No final de sua vida, foi condenado por violar leis anti-homossexuais, e em 1954, cometeu suicídio.

O Homem que sabia demais

Three Novellas

Arkansas

Mientras Inglaterra Duerme

At eighteen, Paul Porterfield aspires to play the piano at the world's great concert halls. So far the closest he has come has been to turn pages of sheet music for his idol, the dashing, temperamental Richard Kennington, a former piano prodigy on the cusp of middle age. Months later, while on holiday with his mother in Italy, Paul encounters Richard a second time. Their earlier attraction develops into an intense affair. As the innocence of first love becomes entangled with the quest for a more enduring happiness, Paul comes to realise that he cannot be a page turner all his life and that he has to confront his ambitions. With artful storytelling, shrewd perception and arch humour, THE PAGE TURNER testifies to the bittersweet truths of strained relationships and the resiliency of the human heart.

David Leavitt's deliciously sharp new novel is a multilayered dissection of literary and sexual mores in the get-ahead eighties, when outrageous success lay seductively within reach of any young writer ambitious enough to grab it. At the dawn of the Reagan era, Martin Bauman—nineteen, clever, talented, and insecure—is enrolled at a prestigious college with a hard-won place under the tutelage of the legendary and enigmatic Stanley Flint, a man who can make or break careers with the flick of a weary hand. Martin is poised on the brink of the writing life, and his twin desires, equally urgent, are to get into print and find his way out of the closet. As he makes his way through the wilderness of New York—falling in love, going to parties, and coming to terms with the emerging chaos of AIDS—Martin matures from brilliant student, to apprentice in a Manhattan publishing house, to one of the golden few to be anointed by the highly regarded magazine in which it is every young writer's dream to be published. Yet despite his apparent success, his emotional and creative desires stubbornly refuse to be satisfied, and his every achievement is haunted by that austere and troubling image of literary perfection, his elusive mentor, Stanley Flint. An irresistibly entertaining epic, erotic, honest, and funny, MARTIN BAUMAN lays bare the life of the artist, in all his venal, envious, poignant glory.

David Leavitt

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