The Book of Lies
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
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-à-clef, and a wicked send-up of the new Ivory Tower.
First published to acclaim in 1998, this new edition features a foreword by David Bergman (The Violet Hour).
"The Book of Lies is funny, dark, sexy, shocking, and yes, smart. Set in the near future ('decades after Stonewall'), the novel tells of a young scholar trying to make his academic bones on the literary bodies of the 'Purple Circle'. Picano skewers the pedagogically pretentious with ease and wit. A wonderful novel, with some of Picano's best writing." – Bay Area Reporter
"Picano treats his nonpulpy subject matter – grieving, the book business, the teaching business – in a pulpy way, and the results are surprisingly entertaining." – New York Times Book Review
"Based on Picano's involvement with the Violet Quill Club (which included Edmund White and Andrew Holleran), this is an absorbing Henry James-style comedy of manners about how even when some writers find their way out of the closet, others still get left behind." – The Mail on Sunday
"Felice Picano's new novel, his 19th book, is a story rich with history – a history that Picano himself was part of and helped shape ..." – The Washington Blade
"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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Things are not what they seem in Picano's (Like People in History) novel of academic intrigue. In the early 21st century, Ross Ohrenstedt is an ambitious assistant professor at UCLA, researching the work of the legendary literary salon the Purple Circle (closely resembling the Violet Quill, a group Picano was involved in that included Edmund White, among others) for his doctoral thesis. While cataloguing the work of a Circle member, Ohrenstedt uncovers a mysterious manuscript that promises to be an academic breakthrough, and begins an increasingly obsessive quest to validate its source. New uncredited documents appear, and Ohrenstedt begins piecing together the life of their suspected author, the previously unrecognized Len Spurgeon--an enigmatic character with seemingly far-reaching influence over the Purple Circle members and their work. Self-consciously evoking Henry James, this tragicomedy of polite society is impressive in its thoroughly imagined detail, although sometimes gratuitous in its lavish descriptions of settings. With individual chapters focusing on various Purple Circle members, Picano is successful in his gossipy recreation of the group of gay literary innovators. In depicting the near future, his amusing assumptions demonstrate a keen tab on trends and the possible new technologies ahead. The surprises at the end keep the reader's head spinning.
