![]() ![]() ![]() Have the secret yearnings of childhood sexuality and the wild excitement of the first stirrings of perversity ever been so eloquently described as in this novel? When Orville discovers an old book on physical culture and begins frantically working out to improve his body, he worries that he isn't sweating enough. Published in the UK in 1945, ten years after the terrible accident in which the author, riding his bicycle, was hit by a car and permanently injured, this amazing (and thinly disguised) autobiographical novel is the graceful and astonishingly erotic tale of Orville Pym, a creative child who has lost his mother to some mysterious disease and "has not yet learned to bear the strain of feeling unsafe with another person." Hating "other people" who imagined "that they understood his mind because he was a boy," our elegant but damaged little hero, "longing for escape, freedom, loneliness and adventure," wanders around the grounds of a hotel where he has been taken by his father to vacation with his older brothers. Just holding it in my hands, so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger. ![]() Maybe there is no better novel in the world than Denton Welch's In Youth Is Pleasure. ![]() From thousands and thousands and thousands of twisted volumes, here goes – John Waters's "Five Books You Should Read to Live a Happy Life If Something Is Basically the Matter with You."Īnd yes, it's all fiction. ![]()
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