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The Line of Beauty: A Novel
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Swimming Pool Library
A literary sensation and bestseller both in England and America, The Swimming-Pool Library is an enthralling, darkly erotic novel of homosexuality before the scourge of AIDS; an elegy, possessed of chilling clarity, for ways of life that can no longer be lived with impunity. "Impeccably composed and meticulously particular in its observation of everything" (Harpers & Queen), it focuses on the friendship of two men: William Beckwith, a young gay aristocrat who leads a life of privilege and promiscuity, and the elderly Lord Nantwich, an old Africa hand, searching for someone to write his biography and inherit his traditions..
Price: $5.25
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The Folding Star: A Novel
The 1995 Booker Prize finalist finally back in print.
Alan Hollinghurst’s hypnotic and exquisitely written novel tells the story of Edward Manners, a disaffected 33-year-old who leaves England to earn his living as a language tutor in a Flemish city. Almost immediately he falls in love with one of his pupils, but can only console himself with other, illicit affairs. With this novel, Hollinghurst exposes us fearlessly to the consequences of unfulfillable, annihilating desire. .
Price: $6.75
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The Spell
Alan Hollinghurst writes like a dream about the nightmare of unequal affection. In his third novel, The Spell, four men dance around one another, their emotions and actions ranging from casual cruelty to anxiety to adoration. Hollinghurst's painful but smiling roundelay alternates between Dorset--where 40ish architect Robin shares a house with the impossibly self-involved Justin--and London. When Justin's ex, Alex, arrives for a weekend in the country, the atmosphere is instantly rich with jealousy and power plays. And after the trio is joined by a younger gay man, Danny--who turns out to be Robin's son--the attractions and duplicities multiply exponentially. Alex, for instance, soon admits to Danny, "I've got a ruinous taste for takers," and they (and we) are off and running. As ever, Hollinghurst's prose is musical and sensual but also deeply witty. Even the birds in this novel modulate their song from somnolent calls to outright chuckles--echoing the pleasures and absurdities of the humans they circle. And the author's feel for the easy intimacies and brutalities that his characters exchange is unmatched. As Justin (clad only in a tanga) escorts Alex around the cottage, he points out some vases: "These pots, darling, were made by potters of the greatest probity." Hollinghurst's descriptions are marvelous, whether of landscape or human frailty. After leaving a rather unrelaxed restaurant with Alex, "Danny recovered his air of bossiness and mystery, like a prefect in the school of pleasure." And when the two obtain some Ecstasy and hit one of Danny's haunts--a brilliantly realized club--the author reveals the rapture and idiocy in each moment: The boys glistened and pawed at the ground. They looked like members of some dodgy brainwashing cult.... Alex saw that what he most wanted was happening and groped marvellingly between the different kinds of happiness, the chemicals and the sex. It seemed that happening and happiness were the same, he must remember that, to tell everyone. But as amusing as Alan Hollinghurst is, his forte is loss. Again and again he reminds us that solitary sadness is a wink away from comedy and sexual possession. --Kerry Fried.
Price: $2.50
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The Ivory Tower (New York Review Books Classics 2004)
In 1914, Henry James began work on a major novel about the immense new fortunes of America's Gilded Age. After an absence of more than twenty years, James had returned for a visit to his native country; what he found there filled him with profound dismay. In The Ivory Tower, his last book, the characteristic pattern underlying so much of his fiction—in which American "innocence" is transformed by its encounter with European "experience"—receives a new twist: raised abroad, the hero comes home to America to confront, as James puts it, "the black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions." James died in 1916 with the first three books of The Ivory Tower completed. He also left behind a "treatment," in which he charted the further progress of his story. This fascinating scenario, one of only two to survive among James's papers, is also published here together with a striking critical essay by Ezra Pound..
Price: $8.19
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Bruges-La-Morte (Dedalus European Classics)
Hugues Viane is a widower who has turned to the melancholy, decaying city of Bruges as the ideal location in which to mourn his wife and as a backdrop for the narcissistic wanderings of his disturbed spirit. He becomess obsessed with a young dancer whom he believes is the double of his beloved wife. The consequent drama leads Hugues to psychological torment and humiliation, culminating in a deranged murder. This 1892 work is a poet's novel, dense, visionary and haunting. Bruges, the `dead city', becomes a metaphor for Hugues' dead wife as he follows its mournful labyrinth of streets and canals in a cyclical promenade of reflection and allusion -- the ultimate evocation of Rodenbach's lifelong love affair with the enduring mystery and mortuary atmosphere of Bruges..
Price: $8.03
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A. E. Housman (Poet to Poet)
Poetry Selected and with an Introduction by Alan Hollinghurst Alan Hollinghurst called A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad "the most vital English poetry collection of the 1890s and perhaps of the whole period from the death of Tennyson until Hardy's Satire of Circumstances." Drawing heavily on this volume, Hollinghurst gathers here a resonant collection of verse from Housman's entire oeuvre that, with its emphasis on the inevitable decay of youth and beauty and on the touching bonds of male friendship, was anthemic for the generation that went to war in 1914..
Price: $6.32
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Alan Hollinghurst's