Philly AIDS Thrift @ Giovanni's Room

Sketchtasy takes place in that late-night moment when everything comes together, and everything falls apart–it’s an urgent, glittering, devastating novel about the perils of queer world-making in the mid-’90s.

The eleventh and final volume in the series that offered readers the best gay-themed stories of the strange, uncanny, and fantastical! Work by such acclaimed authors as Richard Bowes, Sam J. Miller, Sean Eads, and John Chu. A library of all the books never written before their authors passed away; young men hiding their pain through weird body modifications; Captain Hook finally meets the Greek god Pan; even Oscar Wilde himself makes an appearance in this anthology by Lambda Literary Award-winning editor Steve Berman.

In a word-drunk romp through an alternate, pre-apocalyptic United States, Ana Simo’s fiction debut, Heartland, is the uproarious story of a thwarted writer’s elaborate revenge on the woman who stole her lover, blending elements of telenovela, pulp noir, and dystopian satire.

There’s only one solution for a nasty case of writer’s block, and that’s murder. Specifically, that of one Mercy McCabe, a cunning SoHo art dealer who was once our Latina narrator’s rival for the scrumptious Bebe. When she discovers that McCabe has squandered Bebe’s affections after stealing her away, revenge is not enough: she must admit her guilt, sentence herself, and beg for her own execution, Soviet-style.

In the all-too-terrifyingly-familiar America of Heartland, the inconceivable has become ordinary: corruption and greed at the top have led to mass starvation in the heartland; hordes of refugees have escaped from resettlement camps and attack the cities; a puritanical Caliphate has toppled Constantinople, with America in its sights. Meanwhile, escaping her New York life in disguise, our heroine lures McCabe to her home turf: a hilltop house in the Great Plains where her parents worked as domestic servants. Her nemesis, though, is slippery, and McCabe disappears, threatening to ruin a homicidal masterplan so detailed as to be akin to love.

Heartland is a hilarious, genre-defying debut that confronts taboos of race, assimilation, and sex through a high-voltage tale of love, language, and revenge.

Qiang returns to his homeland of China from Silicon Valley to find Beijing undergoing a chaotic transformation in the lead up to hosting the 2008 Olympic Games. Wrecking balls are knocking down entire neighborhoods to make way for new structures more in line with the government’s vision of a modern China. The tumult inspires Qiang to shoot a documentary about the loss of affordable housing, which draws the attention of public security officials. When Qiang is suddenly arrested by local police, it falls on his friend Jake, an American journalist who admires Qiang and his work, to try to figure out how to end the detention. With few options, Jake enlists the help of those he’s not sure he can trust. Dawei, a Chinese itinerant Jake befriended years earlier, returns to Beijing in the midst of a cat-and-mouse game Jake is playing with the authorities to retrieve a memento that has suddenly become extremely valuable. Dawei becomes ensnared in a plan to force the authorities to release Qiang, and Jake must then decide who survives. Based on real events, Robert F. Delaney’s The Wounded Muse takes readers to a city and country undergoing a transformation on a scale previously unseen, where in the shadowed wreckage of forgotten communities people are pushed to psychological extremes to secure their position.