David Leavitt Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Lost Language of Cranes (1986)
  2. Equal Affections (1989)
  3. While England Sleeps (1993)
  4. The Page Turner (1998)
  5. Martin Bauman (2000)
  6. Florence (2002)
  7. The Body of Jonah Boyd (2004)
  8. The Indian Clerk (2007)
  9. Two Hotel Francforts (2013)
  10. Shelter in Place (2020)

Collections

  1. Family Dancing (1984)
  2. A Place I’ve Never Been (1990)
  3. Arkansas (1997)
  4. The Marble Quilt (2001)
  5. Collected Stories (2003)
  6. Stories of David Leavitt (2005)

Anthologies edited

  1. The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories (1994)
  2. The New Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories (2003)
  3. 23 Great Stories (2013)

Non fiction

  1. Italian Pleasures (1996)
  2. Pages Passed from Hand to Hand (1997)
  3. In Maremma (2001)
  4. The Man Who Knew Too Much (2006)

Novels Book Covers

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David Leavitt Books Overview

The Lost Language of Cranes

David Leavitt’s extraordinary first novel, now reissued in paperback, is a seminal work about family, sexual identity, home, and loss.

Set in the 1980s against the backdrop of a swiftly gentrifying Manhattan, The Lost Language of Cranes tells the story of twenty five year old Philip, who realizes he must come out to his parents after falling in love for the first time with a man. Philip’s parents are facing their own crisis: pressure from developers and the loss of their longtime home. But the real threat to this family is Philip’s father’s own struggle with his latent homosexuality, realized only in his Sunday afternoon visits to gay po*rn theaters. Philip’s admission to his parents and his father’s hidden life provoke changes that forever alter the landscape of their worlds.

Equal Affections

Equal Affections tells the story of the funny, loving, and tragic Cooper family. Louise, the indomitable matriarch, has had cancer for twenty years. Her son Danny, a lawyer, lives in a New Jersey suburb with his lover Walter, who is slowly growing obsessed with on line sex; her daughter April is a lesbian activist and folk singer, who knows how to perform a do it yourself artificial insemination using basic kitchen utensils. As Louise battles the slow withdrawal of her husband and the ravages of her disease, and as the entire Cooper family struggles to come to terms with her illness, David Leavitt reveals the profound depth and compassion of his narrative command. ‘Leavitt has written from the point of view of a raging, self dramatizing mother with clarity and with such compassion that we understand her bitterness and mourn her lost chances. The New York Times Book Review

While England Sleeps

David Leavitt has earned high praise for his empathetic portrayal of human sexuality and the complexities of intimate relationships. Now, with While England Sleeps, available for the first time in two years, Leavitt moves beyond precisely controlled domestic drama to create a historical novel, one that has greater breadth and resonance than anything he has written before. Set against the rise of fascism in 1930s Europe, While England Sleeps tells the story of a love affair between the aristocratic young British writer Brian Botsford, who thinks homosexuality is something he will outgrow, and Edward Phelan, a sensitive and idealistic working class employee of the London Underground and a Communist party member. When the strains of class difference, sexual taboo, and Brian’s ambivalence impel Edward to volunteer to fight against Franco in Spain, Brian pursues him across Europe and into the violent chaos of war.

The Page Turner

At the age of eighteen Paul Porterfield dreams of playing piano at the world’s great concert halls, yet the closest he’s come has been to turn pages for his idol, Richard Kennington, a former prodigy who is entering middle age. The two begin a love affair that affects their lives in ways neither could have predicted. ‘Absorbing from start to finish’ The New Yorker, The Page Turner testifies to the tenacity of the human spirit and the resiliency of the human heart.

Martin Bauman

David Leavitt’s deliciously sharp new novel is a multilayered dissection of literary and sexual mores in the get ahead eighties, when outrageous success lay seductively within reach of any young writer ambitious enough to grab it. At the dawn of the Reagan era, Martin Bauman nineteen, clever, talented, 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 careers with the flick of a weary hand. Martin is poised on the brink of the writing life, and his twin desires, equally urgent, are to get into print and find his way out of the closet. As he makes his way through the wilderness of New York falling in love, going to parties, and coming to terms with the emerging chaos of AIDS Martin matures from brilliant student, to apprentice in a Manhattan publishing house, to one of the golden few to be anointed by the highly regarded magazine in which it is every young writer’s dream to be published. Yet despite his apparent success, his emotional and creative desires stubbornly refuse to be satisfied, and his every achievement is haunted by that austere and troubling image of literary perfection, his elusive mentor, Stanley Flint. An irresistibly entertaining epic, erotic, honest, and funny, Martin Bauman lays bare the life of the artist, in all his venal, envious, poignant glory.

Florence

David Leavitt brings the wonders and mysteries of Florence alive, illuminating why it is, and always has been, one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world. The third in the critically acclaimed Writer and the City Series in which some of the world’s finest novelists reveal the secrets of the cities they know best Florence is a lively account of expatriate life in the ‘city of the lily’. Why has Florence always drawn so many English and American visitors? At the turn of the century, the Anglo American population numbered more than thirty thousand. Why have men and women fleeing sex scandals traditionally settled here? What is it about Florence that has made it so fascinating and so repellent to artists and writers over the years?Moving fleetly between present and past and exploring characters both real and fictional, 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, and Mary McCarthy. Lesser known episodes in Florentine history the moving of Michelangelo’s David, and the construction of temporary bridges by black American soldiers in the wake of the Second World War are contrasted with images of Florence today its vast pizza parlors and tourist culture. Leavitt also examines the city’s portrayal in such novels and films as A Room with a View, The Portrait of a Lady and Tea with Mussolini.

The Body of Jonah Boyd

The brilliant new novel from an author The New York Times has called ‘one of his generation’s most gifted writers.’ 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. 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 prot g . 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 acclaimed 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, 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 a showcase for Leavitt’s considerable skills.

The Indian Clerk

The brilliant new novel from one of our most respected writers his most ambitious and accessible to date. 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 in the mail 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 all 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 such as D. H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Indian Clerk takes this extraordinary slice of history and transforms it into an emotional and spell binding story about the fragility of human connection and our need to find order in the world.

Family Dancing

An astonishing collection of short stories set deep in the twisted heart of middle class America from one of America’s most promising and highly acclaimed young writers. Leavitt lays bare the terrible lies of love and pain that bind us all in this ‘astounding collection of short stories’. New York Times. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.

A Place I’ve Never Been

This collection of ten stories continues to chronicle homosexual relationships in the same manner as the author’s previous book ‘Family Dancing’.

Arkansas

Here are three novellas of escape and exile, touching and funny and at times calculatedly outrageous. In ‘Saturn Street,’ a disaffected L.A. screenwriter delivers lunches to homebound AIDS patients, only to find himself falling in love with one of them. In ‘The Wooden Anniversary,’ Nathan and Celia familiar characters from Leavitt’s story collections reunite after a five year separation. And in ‘The Term Paper Artist,’ a writer named David Leavitt, hiding out at his father’s house in the aftermath of a publishing scandal, experiences literary rejuvenation when he agrees to write term papers for UCLA undergraduates in exchange for sex.

The Marble Quilt

In these nine masterly stories, David Leavitt surveys the complicated politics of human relationships in families and communities, in the present day and over the course of the last century. A ‘wizard at blending levity and pathos’ Chicago Tribune, Leavitt displays here his characteristic grace and intelligence, as well as his remarkable candor and wit. Here are stories that range in form from a historical survey to a police interrogation to an e mail exchange. In ‘The Infection Scene,’ a young man’s determined effort to contract HIV is juxtaposed with an account of the early life of Lord Alfred Douglas. In the title story, an expatriate tries to make sense of his ex partner’s senseless murder. In ‘Crossing St. Gotthard,’ the members of an American family traveling in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century find themselves confronting their own mortality as they plunge into a train tunnel in Switzerland. And in ‘Black Box,’ the partner of a man killed in a plane crash is drawn into an unholy alliance with a fellow ‘crash widow.’ Moving from Rome to San Francisco to Florida, from fin de siccle London to Hollywood in the early 1960s, these stories showcase the agility and sensitivity that have earned David Leavitt his reputation as one of the most innovative voices in contemporary short fiction.

Collected Stories

From the celebrated author of The Lost Language of Cranes and While England Sleeps, an important literary event: the complete collected short fiction. This handsome edition gathers together stories from Family Dancing a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner Prize, A Place I’ve Never Been, and The Marble Quilt, which has never before appeared in paperback. Critics have hailed these stories as ‘witty and elegant,’ ‘luminous, touching, and splendid.’ The publication of this collection affirms David Leavitt’s mastery of the form, and reminds us why The New York Times has called him ‘one of his generation’s most gifted writers.’

The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories

An anthology of gay short stories. It begins with the unarticulated desires of two boys swimming in D.H. Lawrence’s ‘A Poem of Friendship’, and ends with the explicit sexual interaction of ‘The Whiz Kids’. It includes a story about AIDS, ‘The Times as it knows us’.

The New Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories

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.

Pages Passed from Hand to Hand

Before E. M. Forster’s Maurice, written in 1914, introduced a new openness about the favorable depiction of homosexuality in English fiction, a number of novels and stories carried coded portraits of homosexuals and homosexuality. Many of these were, by necessity, published privately; still others were written to insure that the homosexual component would be recognizable to a select few; still others embedded homosexual content within such ‘safe’ genres as the Western and the public school novel. There have been several recent anthologies of twentieth century gay fiction, but David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell’s fascinating book is the first to explore the texts that circulated before the ‘gay fiction’ genre came into being, and before greater tolerance allowed writers to treat homosexual themes directly. Leavitt and Mitchell include extracts from stories and novels by well known writers such as Herman Melville, Walter Pater, Henry James, Willa Cather, and D. H. Lawrence, as well as work from neglected figures such as Count Eric Stenbock, John Francis Bloxam, ‘Alan Dale,’ and Gerald Hamilton the inspiration for Christopher Isherwood’s Mr. Norris. The result is an entertaining and revelatory anthology, and a valuable contribution to our understanding of the literary treatment of homosexuality.

In Maremma

A delightfully warm and intimate portrait of life in a small rural town in Tuscany . In Maremma recounts David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell’s restoration of a dilapidated 1950’s farmhouse in southern Tuscany and the process by which they became initiated into a part of Italian life that foreigners rarely see. The pleasures of the olive harvest and picking wild asparagus are juxtaposed with the vagaries of political corruption and self perpetuating bureaucracy. Landscape and weather provide the stuff of reverie, as do the benefits of boredom and the longing for peanut butter. A celebration and exploration of a little known part of Italy, In Maremma is also a fond if sometimes critical corrective to other more rapturous portrayals of Tuscany. ‘An old house, a poor province, and two adventuresome guys who happen to be great writers!. Join them in restoring the old place and getting into the life of the Maremma. Along the way they find themselves becoming Italians, savoring the acqua cotta and learning the difference between a frustone and an aspide.’ Elaine Petrocelli, Book Passage Corte Madera, CA ‘The lovely effect this book has is that you don’t yearn to uproot your entire life and move to Italy, as some of us might after reading Peter Mayle’s accounts of France. Instead, you drive down your own Main Street in the morning, wherever that might be, and you notice the people having their cappuccino outside. You notice the people washing their cars at the local car wash. You watch yourself drop off your own children at school as if, for one glorious moment, you were a traveler, a tourist, a visitor, a foreigner. The mundane is made charming. Priceless.’Los Angeles Times Book Review’Learning to do things ‘the Italian’ way coupled with the complexities only gay men can impart to creating a home proves to be an ultimately rewarding and entertaining endeavor. ‘Genre Magazine

The Man Who Knew Too Much

The story of the persecuted genius who helped create the modern computer. To solve one of the great mathematical problems of his day, Alan Turing proposed an imaginary programmable calculating machine. But the idea of actually producing a ‘Turing machine’ did not crystallize until he and his brilliant Bletchley Park colleagues built devices to crack the Na*zis’ Enigma code, thus ensuring the Allies’ victory in World War II. In so doing, Turing became a champion of artificial intelligence, formulating the famous and still unbeaten Turing Test that challenges our ideas of human consciousness. But Turing’s postwar computer building was cut short when, as an openly gay man in a time when homosexuality was officially illegal in England, he was apprehended by the authorities and sentenced to a ‘treatment’ that amounted to chemical castration, leading to his suicide. With a novelist’s sensitivity, David Leavitt portrays Turing in all his humanity his eccentricities, his brilliance, his fatal candor while elegantly explaining his work and its implications.

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