David Leavitt, página 2 de 4

At the dawn of the Reagan era Martin Bauman, nineteen, clever, ambitious 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 writing careers with the flick of a weary hand. Martin is poised on the threshold of the writing life, his twin desires to get into print and to find his way out of the closet. Moving through the century''s most licentious decade - the decade of cocaine, wild parties, huge advances and the tragic comedown of AIDS - Martin matures from brilliant student to apprentice in a Manhattan publishing house to fully fledged member of the New York literary brat pack. Yet despite his apparent success, his emotional and creative desires refuse, stubbornly, to be satisfied and his every achievement is haunted by the austere and troubling image of literary perfection, his elusive mentor, Stanley Flint. Subtle, erotic, honest and funny, David Leavitt''s deliciously sharp, multi-layered dissection of literary and sexual mores lays bare the life of the artist, in all his venal, envious, self-loathing, poignant glory.

En 1997 David Leavitt y Mark Mitchell decidieron compÉfrse una vieja granja abandonada de los años cincuenta en una de las regiones más pobres y al mismo tiempo más hermosas del sur de la Toscana: Maremma. La restauracion de la casa sirve como pretexto a Leavitt y Mitchell para escribir un delicioso retrato del paisaje, la vida y las costumbres de este lugar de Italia. El relato alterna las bucolicas descripciones de la cosecha de la aceituna, la recogida del esparrago silvestre o la busqueda de muebles antiguos por la region, con las inevitables referencias a la corrupcion politica y a los problemas que les causa la burocracia italiana.Escrito desde la perspectiva de dos norteamericanos que intentan adaptarse al lento ritmo vital de este peculiar rincon de Europa, En Maremma es, sobre todo, un retrato de la Toscana desde dentro.

Un libro que reúne tres relatos que muestran una inteligente, comprometida y en ocasiones divertida visión del mundo gay, abordado desde la cotidianeidad y sin complejos. Un mundo de pasiones, desamor y dudas que no puede dejar indiferente a ningún lector.

''Florence is the only European city I can think of whose most famous citizens, at least in the last 150 years or so, have all been foreigners.'' Thus David Leavitt writes in this lively account of expatriate life in the city of the lily. His narrative begins by asking why Florence has always proven to be such a popular destination for suicides, then moves into an analysis of what makes the city, in Henry James''s words, such a ''delicate case.'' Why, for instance, has Florence always drawn so many English and American visitors. (At the turn of the century, the Anglo-American population numbered more than 30,000.) Why have men and women fleeing sex scandal traditionally settled here? What about Florence has made it so fascinating and so repellent - to artists and writers over the years? Moving between present and past, 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, Mary McCarthy, Mrs Keppel (mistress to King Edward VII) and Henry Labouchere, author of the Labouchere Amendment, under the provisions of which Oscar Wilde was convicted.

This is a complete collection of moving, elegant and often witty short stories from one of America''s most respected writers. Here, David Leavitt covers a range of challenging themes such as illness, grief and betrayal with his inimitable graceful touch. He takes the reader from Switzerland to San Francisco, and from a young man''s attempt to contract the HIV virus to American tourists being startled by the local conventions in Italy. Bringing together "Family Dancing" (a finalist for both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Prize), "A Place I''ve Never Been" and "The Marble Quilt", this edition affirms David Leavitt''s mastery of the short-story form.

The diversity - and unity - of gay love and experience in the twentieth century is celebrated in this acclaimed anthology, which includes twenty-one stories from the original collection, published in 1994, together with fifteen new stories. The texts range from the tender unarticulated longings of D.H. Lawrence's A Poem of Friendship to the explicit sexual. Writers include both men and women, gay and straight, amongst them: John Updike, Edna O'Brien, E.M. Forster, Annie Proulx, William Trevor and Edmund White.