Edited by Joseph Anthony Logiudice  &  Michael Carosone 

Literary Nonfiction. LGBT Studies. Italian American Studies. Edited by Joseph Anthony LoGiudice and Michael Carosone. An amazing collection of essays that finally addresses an experience so many of us share. Evocative, moving, and entertaining, OUR NAKED LIVES brings forth the stories of so many of us who've often felt left out in gay culture as well as in Italian-American culture, while simultaneously celebrating the richness of both.

Publisher: Bordighera Press
PubDate: 5/1/2013
ISBN: 9781599540504
Price: $15.00
Buy it at:  Amazon  -or-  Barnes & Noble

 Tragic, Mystic, Comic & Horrific

Contemporary Gay Romances is the third collection of short fiction by legendary novelist and memoirist, Felice Picano (The Lure, Like People in History, Ambidextrous). It is also his most diverse in terms of the times, places, themes, characters and situations he writes about. Filled with the unexpected, the true, and the amazing, Contemporary Gay Romances moves with ease from gas-lit, upper class London, to a future, climate-altered Bay Area; from semi-rural Florida to Southern California beaches, to an extrasolar planet where people have surprising existences. His characters range from ordinary American suburban housewives to extraordinary children, from grieving young geologists and memory-haunted middle aged men, to British Midlands soccer stars and 22nd Century war heroes. Picano subtitled this collection of stylish, unique, and moving works “Tragic, Comic, Mystic & Horrific,” and they are all that and more. The ten tales include prize winners as well as stories published here for the first time, and are as different from any standard “romances” as you can get, but they will linger in the mind and memory.

Author: Felice Picano
Pages: 240
Pub Date: October 2011
ISBN 13: 9781602826397
Bold Strokes Books $16.95
Buy it HERE

Portraits from My Past

From author Felice Picano, co-founder of the path breaking Violet Quill Club, comes a new collection of memoirs, many of which have never appeared in print. Picano presents sweet and sometimes controversial anecdotes of his precocious childhood, odd, funny, and often disturbing encounters from before he found his calling as a writer and later as one of the first GLBT publishers. Throughout are his delightful encounters and surprising relationships with the one-of-a-kind and the famous – including Tennessee Williams, W.H. Auden, Charles Henri Ford, Bette Midler, and Diana Vreeland.

Published by Chelsea Station Editions
ISBN: 978-0-9844707-7-8
$16

Praise for the memoirs of Felice Picano

“What makes his memoir invaluable and enjoyable is his willingness to dish.” - The New York Times

“Compelling and engrossing, it will conjure up memories of everyone's adolescence, straight or gay.” -Out Magazine

by Jim Piechota for The Bay Area Reporter -  04/07/2011

Franz Kafka once wrote, "It is hard to tell the truth, for although there 'is' one, it is alive and constantly changes its face." Telling truths is something that popular, prolific author and memoirist Felice Picano does extremely well. This is most evident in True Stories: Portraits from My Past, his latest collection of expanded personal essays and life reflections. While some are new, many of these pieces have enjoyed publication in other anthologies, but Picano presents them in their unedited form, free from the shackles of word counts and the red editing pencil.

In the introduction, Picano bows to the "strange, wondrous, or simply nutty" people who have passed through his life, since they're the ones who helped him become the writer that he is today. By extension, his writings are a grand gesture to "those I related to, over the years."

Reveiw from: Lambda Literary.org
The leader in LGBT book reviews, author interviews, opinion and news since 1989

by Dan Lopez on June 27, 2011

In his introduction to Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing (University of Wisconsin Press), co-editor Lázaro Lima defines this slim volume’s scope as an opening statement in a growing conversation, one that confronts the bias of mainstream American cultural constructs and seeks “to envision a different kind of national culture.” It’s a bit like shooting at a moving target as what it means to be Latino and queer in America continues to evolve toward (presumably) some distant equilibrium. All the same, Lima and fellow editor Felice Picano have put together a tight collection of stories and critical thought chronicling the various ways we live today.

“Imitation of Selena” by Ramón García tells the tragic tale of Pesticida, an aging queen obsessed with the slain Tex-Mex singer, and her house of drag children in Corpus Christi, Texas. Cuban-American novelist Achy Obejas contributes “Kimberle,” a harrowing account of two Sapphic friends in an Indiana town yearly terrorized by a serial killer. Charles Rice-González depicts a group of trans bandits in the Bronx projects. Susana Chávez-Silverman’s “Magnetic Island, Sueño Cronica” is an epistolary story told in Spanglish, wonderfully illustrating the editors’ refusal to italicize non-English words on the grounds that Spanish is not a foreign language in the United States, but, rather, our second, unofficial language. It’s an important distinction, and one Lima and Picano stress. While selections like Uriel Quesada’s “I Leave Tomorrow, I Come Back Yesterday” appear here in translation, the majority of the work was written in English for an English-speaking audience. After all, this is not foreign literature. The anthology is designed to showcase a unique and emerging native literature, the “different kind of national culture” Lima references in the introduction. A literature being produced by LGBT writers whose perspective is enriched by a mother (or, often, grandmother) tongue that is Iberian in root and Caribbean/African/South & Central American in flavor, and that is consummately Americano.

EDITED By: Lázaro Lima and Felice Picano
University of Wisconsin Press 
June 2011 
LC: 2010041228 PS 288 pp  <click to buy>

To continue reading the review at Lambda Literary, <click here>