Novels
- City Of Night (1963)
- Numbers (1967)
- This Day’s Death (1969)
- The Vampires (1971)
- The Fourth Angel (1972)
- Rushes (1979)
- Bodies and Souls (1983)
- Marilyn’s Daughter (1988)
- The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez (1991)
- Our Lady of Babylon (1996)
- The Coming of the Night (1999)
- The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens (2003)
- After the Blue Hour (2017)
- Pablo! (2018)
Non fiction
- The Sexual Outlaw (1977)
- Beneath the Skin (2004)
- About My Life and the Kept Woman (2008)
Novels Book Covers
Non fiction Book Covers
John Rechy Books Overview
City Of Night
John Rechy, recipient of the Publishing Triangle’s William Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award, wrote City Of Night in 1963. This radical and daring work, which launched Rechy s reputation as one of America s most courageous novelists, remains the classic document of the garish neon lit world of hustlers, drag queens, and men on the make who inhabited the homosexual underground of the early sixties.
Numbers
Book jacket/back: Johnny Rio, a handsome narcissist but no longer a pretty boy, travels to Los Angeles, the site of past sexual conquest and remembered youthful radiance, in a frenzied attempt to recreate his younger self. Johnny has ten precious days to draw the ‘Numbers,’ the men who will confirm his desirability, and with the hungry focus of a man on borrowed time, he stalks the dark balconies of all night theaters, the hot sands of gay beaches, and shady glens of city parks, attempting to attract shadowy sex hunters in an obcessive battle against the passing of his youth.
The Fourth Angel
This is the compelling, ferociously relevant story of four teenagers playing deadly games with drugs, sex, and one another. Behind a facade of tough cynicism, on a raging search for kicks, they explore the hot, dusty city, bent on trouble.
Bodies and Souls
In Bodies and Souls, Rechy paints a portrait of modern Los Angeles, ‘the most spiritual and physical of cities,’ where we meet characters like Amber, a po*rn superstar; Manny Gomez, a Chicano caught up in the punk rock scene; and Dave Clinton, an aging male stripper. Epic in scope and vision, Bodies and Souls is classic Rechy.
The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez
In The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez, Amalia Gomez thinks she sees a large silver cross in the sky. A miraculous sign, perhaps, but one the down to earth Amalia does not trust. Through Amalia, we take a vivid and moving tour of the ‘other Hollywood,’ populated by working class Mexican Americans, as John Rechy blends tough realism with religious and cultural fables to take us into the life of a Chicano family in L.A. Epic in scope and vision, The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez is classic Rechy.
The Coming of the Night
On its debut, John Rechy’s City of Night was a huge sensation and an international bestseller. In The Coming of the Night Rechy returns to some of the themes and scenes of his now classic first novel. A stunning evocation of gay desire in the moment just before AIDS, this book confirms the author’s position as America’s preeminent gay novelist. It is 1981, a summer night, and an unscripted ritual is about to take place. Jesse, ‘the kid,’ is celebrating one year on the dazzling gay scene, and plans to lose himself completely in the transient pleasures it affords. Clint has fled New York with a sense of unease in the wake of a vicious gay bashing and a night in the sexual underground. Buzz and his gang are cruising the city looking for danger. So is Dave, a ‘leatherman’ devoted to S&M and testing limits. And in the streets a priest is searching for a young hustler named Angel, determined to bring him to Jesus. As the Santa Ana winds, renowned for stirring up desires and violence, breathe fire down the hills of Los Angeles, these and a cast of other characters circle ever closer to the night and to a confrontation as astonishing as it is inevitable. ‘Fresh, beautiful, totally courageous and totally cool, passionate…
. His uncompromising honesty as a gay writer has provoked as much fear as admiration…
. John Rechy doesn’t fit into categories. He transcends them. His individual vision is unique, perfect, loving, and strong.’ Carolyn See, presenting the PEN USA West’s Lifetime Achievement Award
The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens
Now in paperback, the latest novel from the internationally renowned novelist is a riotous bildungsroman that pays homage to the classic eighteenth century picaresque. Loosely inspired by Fielding’s Tom Jones, The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens follows the journey of handsome Lyle Clemens as he travels through the religious fundamentalist world of Texas to the gambling palaces of Las Vegas and the enticing traps of Los Angeles’s mythologies. As Lyle approaches adulthood, everyone wants him to be something he’s not. His beautiful mother wants to make him into a reflection of the cowboy who abandoned her; a group of avaricious fundamentalists plot to convert him into ‘the Lord’s Cowboy’ to rouse their televangelical empire to new frenzied heights; and the lovely Maria wants him to fulfill her varying fantasies of ‘true love.’ When Lyle leaves home to make his own destiny, he encounters a gallery of charlatans and wistful souls, quirky gamblers, aging starlets, and wily po*rnographers. The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens is a hilarious, bittersweet, and wise book that establishes once again John Rechy’s great storytelling gifts.
The Sexual Outlaw
This angry, elegant outcry against homosexual oppression is an explosive nonfiction account, with commentaries, of three days and nights in the sexual underground of Los Angeles in the seventies.
Beneath the Skin
When John Rechy broke out in 1963 as the bestselling author of City of Night, his novel about the underworld of gay male prostitution, he became a source for provocative commentary on sex, homosexuality, and culturally transgressive literature for publications as varied as the New York Times, The Nation, the Advocate, and Forum. Beneath the Skin collects more than four decades of the author’s outspoken essays many never before reprinted and almost none ever appearing previously in book form. Rechy holds forth on topics ranging from the birth of the sexual liberation movement, the rise of Anita Bryant, and the emergence of AIDS to sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and last year’s repeal of sodomy laws. Beneath the Skin also includes pieces on gay and lesbian authors such as Gore Vidal, Jack Kerouac, Christopher Isherwood, Carson McCullers, and Elizabeth Bowen, and non gay figures like Philip Roth, William T. Vollman, and Joyce Carol Oates, as well as essays on Madonna, Tom Cruise, Eminem, Liberace, Marilyn Monroe, and the gay silent film star Ramon Novarro.
About My Life and the Kept Woman
The untold personal life story of the novelist whom Gore Vidal has hailed as one of the few original American writers of the last century. John Rechy’s first novel, City of Night, is a modern classic and his subsequent body of work has kept him among America s most important writers. Now, for the first time, he writes about his life, in a volume that is a testament to the power of pride and self acceptance. Rechy was raised Mexican American in Texas, at a time when Latino children were routinely discriminated against. As he grew older and as his fascination with a notorious kept woman from his childhood deepened Rechy became aware that his differences lay not just in his heritage but in his sexuality. While he performed the roles others wanted for him, he never allowed them to define him whether it was the authoritarians in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, the bigoted relatives of his Anglo college classmates, or the men and women who wanted him to be something he was not. About My Life and the Kept Woman is as much a portrait of intolerance as of an individual who defied it to forge his own path.
Related Authors