The Indian Clerk: A Novel
by David Leavitt
from Bloomsbury USA
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 envelope covered with Indian stamps. Inside he finds a rambling letter from a self-professed mathematical genius who claims to be on the brink of solving the most important unsolved mathematical problem of all time. Some of his Cambridge colleagues dismiss the letter as a hoax, but Hardy becomes convinced that the Indian clerk who has written it—Srinivasa Ramanujan—deserves to be taken seriously. Aided by his collaborator, Littlewood, and a young don named Neville who is about to depart for Madras with his wife, Alice, he determines to learn more about the mysterious Ramanujan and, if possible, persuade him to come to Cambridge. It is a decision that will profoundly affect not only his own life, and that of his friends, but the entire history of mathematics.
Based on the remarkable true story of the strange and ultimately tragic relationship between an esteemed British mathematician and an unknown—and unschooled—mathematical genius, and populated with such luminaries such as D. H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Indian Clerk takes this extraordinary slice of history and transforms it into an emotional and spell-binding story about the fragility of human connection and our need to find order in the world.
Apartment in Athens (New York Review Books Classics)
by Glenway Wescott
from NYRB Classics
Like Wescott's extraordinary novella The Pilgrim Hawk (which Susan Sontag described in The New Yorker as belonging "among the treasures of 20th-century American literature"), Apartment in Athens concerns an unusual triangular relationship. In this story about a Greek couple in Nazi-occupied Athens who must share their living quarters with a German officer, Wescott stages an intense and unsettling drama of accommodation and rejection, resistance and compulsion—an account of political oppression and spiritual struggle that is also a parable about the costs of closeted identity.
Selected Stories (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
by E. M. Forster
from Penguin Classics
Although he is best known for his novels-several of which have been made into popular movies-E.M. Forster also published stories. This volume, which collects those stories published during Forster's lifetime, provides an opportunity for readers to discover these less familiar works. Rich in irony and alive with sharp observations on the surprises life holds, the stories often feature violent events, discomforting coincidences, and other disruptive happenings that throw the characters' perceptions and beliefs off balance.
In their keen Introduction, David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell discuss Forster's place in both the short-story tradition and in the tradition of gay literature.
The Lost Language of Cranes: A Novel
by David Leavitt
from Bloomsbury USA
Arkansas: Three Novellas
by David Leavitt
from Mariner Books
David Leavitt's reputation has rested upon stories and novels that explicate a sedate, upper-middle class world of reserved emotions and sexuality. In his new collection of three novellas Arkansas, he explores new territory. Droll, surprising, and very sexy, these works often shock and startle the reader. In "The Term Paper Artist," a writer named David Leavitt writes school papers for cute undergraduates in exchange for sexual favors, and in "Saturn Street." a gay man who delivers lunches to homebound people with AIDS falls in love with one of his clients. Beautifully written and alarmingly funny, Arkansas is one of the best works of gay fiction in years.
Here are three novellas of escape and exile, touching and funny and at times calculatedly outrageous. In "Saturn Street," a disaffected L.A. screenwriter delivers lunches to homebound AIDS patients, only to find himself falling in love with one of them. In "The Wooden Anniversary," Nathan and Celia - familiar characters from Leavitt's story collections - reunite after a five-year separation. And in "The Term-Paper Artist," a writer named David Leavitt, hiding out at his father's house in the aftermath of a publishing scandal, experiences literary rejuvenation when he agrees to write term papers for UCLA undergraduates in exchange for sex.
Collected Stories
by David Leavitt
from Bloomsbury USA
Florence: A Delicate Case (Writer and the City)
by David Leavitt
from Bloomsbury USA
Equal Affections
by David Leavitt
from Grove Press
The Indian Clerk
by David Leavitt
from Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Martin Bauman: or, A Sure Thing
by David Leavitt
from Mariner Books
David Leavitt's deliciously sharp 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. Martin Bauman — nineteen, talented, and insecure — is enrolled at a prestigious college and wins a place under the tutelage of the legendary Stanley Flint, a man who makes or breaks careers with the flick of a weary hand. An irresistibly entertaining epic, erotic, honest, and funny, Martin Bauman "draws one character so masterfully that this character will stick in the reader's mind as strongly as Magwitch or Harry Lime" (Philadelphia Inquirer).
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