Douglas A. Martin

Outline of My Lover is a book "full of hard-won, fraught, unsparing emotional truth" (Colm Tóibín). Set on the fringes of a music scene in a Southern college town, a young student driven to flee a troubled adolescence and a well-off, established artist-musician form a relationship through a pattern of sex and reticence, impacting both their lives and soon shifting expectations. Written "as if telling the truth was a matter of survival" (Andrew O'Hagan), it is a bildungsromanand love story where to separate one from the other becomes impossible.

Outline of My Lover

For readers of Michael Cunningham's The Hours and Madeline Miller's Song of Achilles, this genre-bending exploration of the tragic figure of Branwell Brontë and the dismal, dazzling landscape that inspired his sisters to greatness is now available in a new edition with an introduction by Darcey Steinke. Branwell Brontë--brother of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—has a childhood marked by tragedy and the weight of expectations. After the early deaths of his mother and a beloved older sister, he is kept away from school and tutored at home by his father, a curate, who rests all his ambitions for his children on his only son. Branwell grows up isolated in his family’s parsonage on the moors, learning Latin and Greek, being trained in painting, and collaborating on endless stories and poems with his sisters. Yet while his sisters go on to write Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and Agnes Grey, Branwell wanders from job to job, growing increasingly dependent on alcohol and opium and failing to become a great poet or artist. With rich, suggestive sentences “perfectly fitted to this famously imaginative, headstrong family” (Publishers Weekly), Branwell is a portrait of childhood dreams, thwarted desire, the confinements of gender—and an homage to the landscape and milieu that inspired some of the most revolutionary works of English literature.

A Novel of the Brontë Brother

Branwell

Treacherously comic and poignant, the autobiographical stories in They Change the Subject follow a young man’s quest for identity through love and desire. Sustained by a single voice, the stories simultaneously offer a fractured novel and stand, powerfully, on their own. At the center of each tale is the heightened, visceral possibility of unexpected emotional encounters—from an escort’s dates in Manhattan hotels to a photo shoot that doubles as seduction. Always pushing toward a bigger shiver of passion, Martin’s young-man-on-the-make learns how to adapt his persona to suit his lovers’ needs and tries to embrace his own experience—and his self—by becoming the purest object of desire.

They Change the Subject

Martin's lyric essay, written through Kathy Acker's evocative prose, public statements, and private archives, follows Acker through New York's downtown St. Mark's Poetry Project scene, Black Mountain College, and the Beats, as Acker embarks on her own deconstructions of autobiographical and historical subjects, art procedurals, proto-conceptual writing, legacies, and spirits.

Acker

In the sleepy college town of Athens, Georgia, a young man goes off to college to bed the luminous local rock star. From his working class family to a world of rich vicarious living, Martin's story is told in sparse, lyric prose that lingers with beauty but doesn't waste a moment. In this alternative bildungsroman, the unspoken relationship soon distorts under the toll of world tours and plush overseas hotel rooms. Love fails under celebrity's harsh distorting light, and the student loses his innocence.

A Novel

Michael Stipe

Tom Gilroy

Grant Lee Phillips

A year of haiku moments pares life down to the sparest of language, including contributions from Douglas Martin, Grant Lee Phillips, Tom Gilroy, Anna Grace, Rick Roth, Jim McKay, and others. Original.

Douglas A. Martin

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