David Leavitt

Louise Cooper has been battling cancer for over twenty years. Her growing resentment towards her suburban life and her husband, Nat, compounded by his affair, have left her longing for the life she dreamed of having in her youth. Meanwhile her family are facing other challenges. Her son Danny, a lawyer in San Francisco, has discovered his lover is growing obsessed with online sex, and her daughter, a lesbian protest-singer, announces herself pregnant after performing DIY artificial insemination with everyday kitchen utensils.This is a rich exploration of a family facing inexorable change.

From the author of THE LOST LANGUAGE OF CRANES, EQUAL AFFECTIONS and THE PAGE TURNER, a collection of short stories which tell of middle-class America, and the lives of its people.

It is the summer of 1940, and Lisbon is the only neutral port left in Europe - a city filled with spies and refugees of every nationality, tipping back absinthe to pass the time until they can escape. Awaiting safe passage to New York, two couples meet: Pete and Julia Winters, expatriate Americans fleeing their sedate life in Paris; and Edward and Iris Freleng, sophisticated, wealthy, bohemian and beset by all the social and sexual anxieties of their class. As Portugal's neutrality and the world's future hang in the balance, the hidden threads of their lives begin to come loose. This journey will change the four of them irrevocably.

A loving exploration of one of the greatest collaborations of the past century, THE INDIAN CLERK is a novel that brilliantly orchestrates questions of colonialism, sexual identity and the nature of genius. Una primorosa exploración sobre una de las mayores colaboraciones del siglo pasado, "The Indian Clerk" es una novela que entrelaza con maestría las cuestiones del colonialismo, la identidad sexual y la naturaleza del genio.

On a January morning in 1913, G. H. Hardy - eccentric, charismatic and, at thirty-seven, already considered the greatest British mathematician of his age - receives a mysterious envelope covered with Indian stamps. Inside he finds a rambling letter from a self-professed mathematical genius who claims to be on the brink of solving the most important unsolved mathematical problem of his time. Some of his Cambridge colleagues dismiss the letter as a hoax, but Hardy becomes convinced that the Indian clerk who has written it - Srinivasa Ramanujan - deserves to be taken seriously. Aided by his collaborator, Littlewood, and a young don named Neville who is about to depart for Madras with his wife, Alice, he determines to learn more about the mysterious Ramanujan and, if possible, persuade him to come to Cambridge. It is a decision that will profoundly affect not only his own life, and that of his friends, but the entire history of mathematics. Based on the remarkable true story of the strange and ultimately tragic relationship between an esteemed British mathematician and an unknown - and unschooled - mathematical genius, and populated with such luminaries as D. H.Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Indian Clerk fashions from this fascinating period an exquisitely nuanced and utterly compelling story about the fragility of human connection and our need to find order in the world.

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.

It's 1969, and Judith "Denny" Denham has just begun an affair with Dr. Ernest Wright, a psychology professor at Wellspring University, who just happens to be her boss. But her position in the Wright household is not merely as a mistress. Ernest's wife, Nancy, has taken Denny under her wing as a four-hand piano partner and general confidante, although Denny can never seem to measure up to Anne, Nancy's best friend from back East, either in piano playing skill or general grace. Ernest's eldest son has fled over the Canadian border to escape the draft, while his only daughter has embarked on a secret affair with her father's protege. The remaining son, Ben, is fifteen, and as delicate and insufferable as only a poetry-writing fifteen-year-old can be. That autumn, Denny crosses the freeway that separates Wellspring from its less affluent mirror image, Springwell, to spend Thanksgiving with the Wrights and their assortment of strays, including two honored guests: the eagerly anticipated Anne and Anne's new husband, the novelist Jonah Boyd.The chain of events set in motion that Thanksgiving will change the lives of everyone involved in ways that none can imagine, and that won't become clear for decades to come. Hilarious and scorching, by turns tender and tendentious, David Leavitt's first novel in four years is a tribute to the power of home, the lure of success, the mystery of originality, and, above all, the sisterhood of secretaries. Flawlessly crafted and full of surprises, it is the perfect showcase for this author's considerable skills.

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 restauración 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 bucólicas descripciones de la cosecha de la aceituna, la recogida del espárrago silvestre o la búsqueda de muebles antiguos por la región, con las inevitables referencias a la corrupción política 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 rincón de Europa, En Maremma es, sobre todo, un retrato de la Toscana desde dentro.

'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.

A principis de lera Reagan a Nova York, Martin Bauman, un jove de dinou anys inteláligent, ambiciós i insegur aconsegueix matricular-se en un selecte seminari descriptura, tutelat pel llegendari i enigmatic Stanley Flint, un home madur caçatalents lite

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.

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.