The Book of Lies: A Novel - Softcover

Picano, Felice

3.6

140 ratings by Goodreads

9781555835927: The Book of Lies: A Novel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1555835929 ISBN 13: 9781555835927

Publisher: Alyson Books, 2000

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Bright, ambitious, and handsome, Ross Ohrenstedt is a high flier in the fashionable field of queer studies. He has just taken a prestigious university position in Los Angeles and has been appointed to oversee the collection of papers and works of a leading light of the gay literary salon known as the Purple Circle. Ross stumbles across a "lost" work by an unknown author and his quest to identify the mystery writer and achieve the glory of scholastic tenure unveils increasingly bizarre and unbalanced facts about a group of writers who in the 1970s and 1980s broke new ground in the creation of a gay literary sensibility. But the dark truth contained within The Book of Lies is even more startling. With biting wit and a lush sense of place and character, Felice Picano's daring novel is at once a stylish mystery, a comical roman � clef, and a wicked send-up of the new Ivory Tower.

"Leave it to Felice Picano to add a walloping dose of melodrama and intrigue to a tale already redrawing genre boundaries...What Picano does is take an academic mystery (subject matter that might have proved tedious or solipsistic in lesser hands) and morphs it into something new--a page-turning, often campy, occasionally serious critique of academia and historical truth, literary celebrity, and the imminent future of America."-Philadelphia Tribune

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. A native of New York, Felice Picano now lives in Los Angeles.

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Review:

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

About the Author:

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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