"Old St. Paul's … is a 'disaster story' worthy of Hollywood, where an all-star cast is introduced merely to be decimated by fire, flood, earthquake, shipwreck, alien invasion, or act of God. It is an apocalypse of biblical proportions, laced with love, intrigue, bravery, humour and horror."– Stephen Carver

Horatio Alger, Jr., displayed sensitivity and affection for adolescent boys in both his fiction and in his personal life. His novels frequently involve an impoverished boy with a good heart who overcomes his circumstances often by gaining the attention of an older gentleman who takes him in.

Ragged Dick, Alger's first novel, was his most popular. It is about a fourteen-year-old homeless boy trying to make a living on the streets of 1860s New York.

David Blaize was among the most popular of the romantic friendship novels popular among British public school boys in the years leading up to the First World War. It is generally considered the most accomplished of those novels and is also more homoerotic than its contemporaries. Author Edward Frederic Benson fell in love with several students, including the English cricketer Vincent Yorke, while at Cambridge.

This is the dystopian novel that Pope Francis has twice urged Catholics to read (in 2013 and again in 2015). Before Huxley, before Orwell, and long before Fahrenheit 451, A Clockwork Orange, Blade Runner, and The Hunger Games, Robert Hugh Benson wrote a story of the coming of the Anti-Christ that today is considered one of the first modern dystopian novels. Lord of the World, published in 1907, presents a world controlled by Freemasonry, with only a small Catholic minority bravely opposing them.

My Ántonia was Cather’s first novel to be considered a masterpiece—an evaluation that still holds true today. Published in 1918, the book established her reputation. Cather continued the focus on place and the emphasis on working-class people that had been ongoing in American literature since the local color movement of the late 1860s, but she brought the focus to a locale—America’s High Plains--that previously had not been explored in such depth.

"This slim novel features the travails of Alexandra Bergson and her three brothers: Swedish immigrants attempting to maintain a foothold on the windswept prairielands of Nebraska at the turn of the 20th century. The prose is clear and – as befitting the subject matter – pared down to often brutal effect." - The Guardian

“I don’t think it’s a stretch to regard The Professor’s House as not only Cather’s best work but as one of the five great novels in American literature.”

Reknowned Russian writer Anton Chekhov wrote almost one-thousand stories rich in humanity, sensitivity, empathy, wisdom, soul, insight, and--importantly—a beautiful, bewitching, subtle humor. Oh, and by the way, he also is considered the greatest dramatist of the 19th and early 20th Century. This is a collection of his best fiction.

"The first modern thriller," Riddle of the Sands enjoyed immense popularity when first published and has been named the second best spy novel of all time by The Daily Telegraph and one of the ten classic spy novels by The Guardian. Best-selling author Ken Follett describes it as "an open-air adventure thriller about two young men who stumble upon a German armada preparing to invade England."

Is it dystopian fiction or narrative nonfiction? Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year has baffled publishers and librarians since it’s first appearance in March 1722. It is one man’s account of events during what until recently was the last Great Plague of London in 1665.

Bleak House is perhaps Dickens’ best novel. This particular story represents the highest point of his intellectual maturity. When Dickens wrote Bleak House he had grown up. After his decisive victories Napoleon began to put his house in order; after his decisive victories Dickens also began to put his house in order. The house, when he had put it in order, was Bleak House.

The perfect gift and coffee table book for the readers on your list. After the year 1843 the one literary work which Dickens never neglected was to furnish a Christmas story for his readers; and it is due in some measure to the help of these stories, brimming over with good cheer, that Christmas has become in all English-speaking countries a season of gladness, of gift giving at home, and of remembering those less fortunate than ourselves, who are still members of a common brotherhood.

A masterpiece of dark undertones, a spectular sense of time and place, societal criticism, and the story of a boy every good reader would wish to adopt.

The New York Times said of Our Mutual Friend, the last novel completed by Dickens, that for most readers it would "be considered his best." While expressing all the humanism and humor of Dickens's early work, Our Mutual Friend is also the author's most modern novel and one of his most sophisticated. Both thoughtful and whimsical, and at times uproariously funny, this novel is a must for Dickens readers.

A Tale of Two Cities in many respects distinct from all his others. It stands by itself among Dickens's masterpieces, in sombre and splendid loneliness--a detached glory to its author, and to his country's literature.

Disraeli included schoolboy romantic friendships in several of his novels, including Coningsby and Contarini Fleming: “It seemed to me that I never beheld so lovely and so pensive a countenance. His face was quite oval, his eyes deep blue: his rich brown curls clustered in hyacinthine grace upon the delicate rose of his downy cheek, and shaded the light blue veins of his clear white forehead. I beheld him: I loved him. My friendship was a passion."

“The proposition tempted me; it is not every day that one is invited in such gentlemanly fashion to wallow on all fours with young Arabs.” “The traveller Temple was struck, at Nefta, with the beauty of its ‘desart nymphs, whose eyes are all fire and brilliancy,’ and he might have said the same of the boys.” As the above quotations from Norman Douglas’s Fountains in the Sand attest, one need not strain one’s eyes too much reading between the lines to find the homoerotic in his travel writing.

E. M. Forster's provocative first novel about ethnicity, class, friendship, and--of course--love.

This edition of Forster's classic first novel is designed for classroom use. Questions for discussion appear at the end of each chapter to enhance reading comprehension, critical thinking, and encourage a close reading of the text. Where Angels Fear To Tread is ... a whirlwind that spins around the character of Philip Herriton, who is torn between what he believes is right, and what he has been taught to believe is right. His attraction to the swarthy Gino adds an unspoken layer of tension.

Forster's second novel, The Longest Journey, is an emotional bildungsroman described by the author himself as the book "I am most glad to have written." The novel follows the character of Rickie Elliot from his Cambridge days through a problematic engagement and involves compelling secondary characters such as the illegitimate half-brother Rickie never knew existed. Lionel Trilling described the novel as "Perhaps the most brilliant, the most dramatic, and the most passionate of [Forster's] works

This classroom edition contains questions for discussion after each of the thirty-five chapters and also for the entire novel. Professors may choose to order the classroom edition for the entire class or order the novel-only edition (ISBN 978-1495318696) for the class and the classroom edition for themselves. Any reader should gain insight into the novel from this classroom edition.

"Forster's innovation remains: he allowed the English comic novel the possibility of a spiritual and bodily life, not simply to exist as an exquisitely worked game of social ethics but as a messy human concoction. He expanded the comic novel's ethical space (while unbalancing its moral certainties) simply by letting more of life in . Austen asks for toleration from her readers. Forster demands something far stickier, more shameful: love." - Zadie Smith

This Classroom Edition of Forster's classic novel contains questions for discussion after each chapter to help students with reading comprehension, cultural understanding, critical thinking, and a close reading of the text.

Forster's first three novels are presented here with questions for discussion following each chapter to enhance reader comprehension and encourage a close reading of the text.

Winner of multiple book prizes, Lady Into Fox is the story of a man whose wife turns into a fox. The story is thought to be an allegorical love letter from Garnett to his former lover, Duncan Grant.

The Counterfeiters by André Gide, written in the early Twentieth Century, is one of the bravest coming‑of‑age stories ever written. Set in Paris, it intertwines the lives of youths, writers, and worldly schemers to examine authenticity, moral compromise, and the forging of identity, sexual and otherwise. Gide gives readers the defiant student Bernard Profitendieu, his sensitive friend Olivier Molinier, the literary uncle Edouard, and the calculating aristocrat Robert de Passavant.

Diary of a Madman is a representative compilation of some of Nikolai Gogol's best stories. This edition contains a new introduction that helps place Gogol's work in the canon of gay literature.

A high school senior in small town Arkansas finds a new boy in class on the first day of school--a handsome exchange student from Turkey whose presence in town causes a stir. As the friendship develops, hearts and minds are stirred as well, especially when the young Turk attempts to teach his new American friend the traditional Turkish sport of oil wrestling.

By turns funny, romantic, erotic, and sad, this evocative novel brilliantly recreates the landscape of late adolescence, when friendships seem eternal and loves reincarnate. Unique in coming of age fiction, Clicking Beat on the Brink of Nada (Cody) quickly won praise from reviewers and readers worldwide. "Keith Hale's novel aches with adolescent first loves. It is tender, funny, and true." - William Burroughs

Heart and Soul follows Arkansas country boy Ben Goodman through childhood and adolescence, focusing on Ben's life after he crosses paths with the book's other protagonists, the brothers Ethan and Daniel Henry. Each boy has a compelling story, and when the sad stories of their separate lives merge into the tender stories of their time spent together, the result is both heartwarming and hopeful.

What do you do when your girlfriend's younger brother is the best-looking person on the planet and has a thing for you? Parish doesn't know what he's going to do, but he's about to find out. Luke Hartwell delivers a story that is both charming and sexy in this tale of friendship between a younger male who knows he's gay and the guy getting dumped by his sister.

When a young boy at a bowling alley has his cheeseburger delivered by a handsome future air force cadet, an infatuation develops so strong that three years later, when he learns the older boy's home town, he sets off on his bike to find him. The relationship that develops between the two boys is one of the most heart-warming and seductive in coming of age literature.

Keith Hale explores the relationship between gay and straight best friends in this sparse, moving story. Chris has been in love with his best friend Jimmy since childhood. While Chris is at college, Jimmy is sent to prison. Now Jimmy is free once more and the two meet again. Chris, or "Topi," as Jimmy calls him, begins to understand that Jimmy is not the only one who has made mistakes.

Yusuf Parish Jimmy: Two stories from the Heart of Texas and one from the Arkansas Delta collects three of Keith Hale’s shorter works of fiction into one volume. In “Breathless,” a high school senior in small town Arkansas finds a new boy in class on the first day of school--a handsome exchange student from Turkey whose presence in town causes a stir. As the friendship develops, hearts and minds are stirred as well.

Aside from Desire is a complete collection of Luke Hartwell’s shorter fiction as of August 2025. Many of these stories also appear, with commentary from the characters, in Hartwell’s novel Jeremy Bardon. “Handsome Johnny” provides a surprising follow-up to Atom Heart John Beloved. “Huddled Close” is a seductive addition to Love Underneath, while “And Then We Did the Stetson” is an astonishingly sexy postlude to “Michael.” Also sizzling hot are “Huddled Close,” “The Angel,” and “Pillow Talk."

A breathtaking love story and an intense coming of age story that resembles no other book. John's narrative voice is one of the most unique in gay literature. Atom Heart John Beloved is literate, intimate, erotic, and delightful, delivering unexpected moments of grace.

Luke Hartwell does it again! "Baby Self Hate" is a sultry but funny story of sex and infatuation. As always with Hartwell, the brilliance of the narrative voice shines brightest. Cam, like other Hartwell narrators, is angry but funny, purposeful but confused, and humorous but unexpectedly profound. Although sexy and sought after, Cam sees life darkly and takes solace in fishing. His relationship with a boy he meets in therapy is a wild, unpredictable ride.

When college freshman Lucas sees Mason, a senior with stunning good looks, in the nude in a campus production of Equus, he is smitten. But he's also smitten with Juan, the handsome former champion bull rider who accompanied him to the play. To add to the abundance of riches, Juan introduces Lucas to Kaden, the unbelievably attractive eighteen-year-old bull rider he is training who is just beginning a rise that could take him to the top. All eyes are on Lucas, who has eyes for them all.

Jeremy Bardon is an epic tale from Luke Hartwell that, like Atom Heart John Beloved before it, is as profound and beautiful as it is sexually stunning. The characters are as uncommon and breathtaking, not only in appearance but in their worldview, as the Hartwell characters who came before them. Indeed, some of Luke's boys reappear in these pages.

A groundbreaking merger of genres, Luke Hartwell's Love Underneath is as distinctive as its predecessors. Using characters and early chapters from his deleted novel Locomotives in Winter, Hartwell has created a beautiful, sexy story of guys who love.

Ben cannot keep his mind off the handsome young wrestler sitting at the back of his world literature class. He fantasizes and fantasizes, and then he acts.

Luke Hartwell's Nathan's Story combines elements of Keith Hale's coming-of-age novella Space with characters from Luke's provocative novel Atom Heart John Beloved. Hartwell intertwines the story of Nathan and Harper with the story of Nathan and John while avoiding a rehash of the Atom Heart John Beloved story line. The result is a powerful, multi-faceted love story that makes readers think, covers controversial ground, produces tears, and brings plenty of smiles.

Contains Jack London's The Iron Heel, H.G. Wells' The Sleeper Awakes, and Robert Hugh Benson's Lord of the World, three dystopian novels that were published within ten years of each other and ushered in the genre. *Introduced and edited by Luke Hartwell. Before Huxley, before Orwell, and long before Fahrenheit 451, A Clockwork Orange, Blade Runner, and The Hunger Games, a trio of authors wrote what today are considered the first dystopian novels.

The most homoerotic of Hesse’s novels, Demian tells the story of a middle-class youth whose life and values are upended when he meets the charismatic, self-assured Demian. The novel, like its protagonist, is heavily influenced by the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Carl Jung.

Hesse's classic novel. "He shivered inwardly like a small animal, like a bird or a hare, when he realized how alone he was.

Steppenwolf delves into the existential struggles of its main character, Harry Haller, nicknamed the "Steppenwolf," a solitary and intellectually-gifted man wrestling with feelings of alienation, despair, and a divided self. The book explores his complex psyche, isolation from society, and search for meaning in a rapidly changing world.

Robert Hichens was an English novelist, journalist, short story writer, poet, dramatist, lyricist, music critic, screenwriter, and playwright. A Spirit in Prison won critical praise for its psychological insights and vivid pictures of local color. Hichens was gay and never married. Being a lifelong bachelor left him free to pursue his great love, traveling, and to produce an astonishing number of books, of which this is one of the best.