Felice Picano

In Pursuit: A Victorian Entertainment, Addison Grimmins, slum-born but ambitious and ruthless, sets out on a quest to bring back the Lord Exchequer of England’s missing wife. Now, in Pursued: Lillian’s Story, we get the other side of the story from Lillian, the woman being pursued.

From boat to stagecoach to train, as Lillian and her questionably reliable companions elude her pursuers throughout Europe, Lillian writes to her daughter-in-law on her honeymoon, warning her of what she may expect marrying into the Ravenglass estate and its cursed male line of descent. Lillian recounts how as a girl she entered a dream marriage to the “golden” son of a great Lord. And how, little by little, one misfortune after another, the dream union threatened to become a nightmare that would destroy her reputation—and her life.

Handsome, intelligent, street-smart, ruthlessly ambitious, and omnisexual, young Addison Grimmins has been hired by the Lord Exchequer of England to be his second and to do what Lord R. cannot do himself. After a country estate wedding, the Marchioness of R. is discovered missing. Is it a kidnapping or…a more sinister plot? Addison vows to find her and bring her back no matter what it takes. It is the 1880s and despite only letters, bribed information, and telegrams as communication; despite only horse, coach, and train service as transportation, Addison tracks Lady R. across Europe, via the strangest people and places: from Venetian palaces to opium dens. Who and what he discovers about her, and more fatefully about his own life, will lead Addison to the crisis of his life, an extraordinary decision, and a stiletto duel with his most implacable foe.

And don't miss the sequel, Pursued: Lillian's Story

The 20th Century is over and done with and nothing can be changed. Or is it? Felice Picano's two short novels take delicious what-if peeks at outwitting Time's (seemingly) unbending Arrow.

In Ingoldsby, a handsome graduate student finds himself caretaking a Midwestern architectural treasure in which not everything or everyone is what they seemor when they seem either! But a sexy newcomer challenges him to change all that, for himself, and for a gay youth way out of his own time.

In Wonder City of the West, a man too young in spirit to be at retirement age takes a leap back to Golden Age Hollywood. He encounters youth, friendship, a movie star lover, and talents he never knew he possessed. But as he succeeds beyond his dreams, he must askis he merely a tool for a shadowy group with a far larger purpose?

Provocative, mind-bending, sensual, and entertaining, 20th Century Un-limited is an unexpected addition to an established body of work by an author unafraid to confound and surpass expectations.

Twelve O'Clock Tales is the fourth collection of short fiction by legendary novelist and memoirist, Felice Picano (The Lure, Like People in History, True Stories). A personal homage to the storytellers of his youth, Edgar Allen Poe, E.F. Benson, and H. P. Lovecraft, as well as his acquaintances, Arthur C. Clarke and Harlan Ellison. Thirteen dark tales, eerie, bizarre, and dreamlike, the tales will thrill and disturb, discomfort and titillate, enthrall and leave you wondering. Picano ranges across time and space, from tribal West Africa to the American heartland, to a lab in Venezuela, and a California Highway fifteen years from now. His characters range from a teen accident survivor with a secret, to a far-future scholar forced to travel to a galactic backwater, to a retired L.A. cop who dabbles in astrology, and a peasant girl in B.C.E. Israel encountering the strangest of strangers. The thirteen tales include brand new stories and acknowledged Picano masterworks collected here for the first time.

Contemporary Gay Romances is the third collection of short fiction by legendary novelist and memoirist, Felice Picano (The Lure, Like People in History, Ambidextrous). It is also his most diverse in terms of the times, places, themes, characters and situations he writes about. Filled with the unexpected, the true, and the amazing, Contemporary Gay Romances moves with ease from gas-lit, upper class London, to a future, climate-altered Bay Area; from semi-rural Florida to Southern California beaches, to an extrasolar planet where people have surprising existences. His characters range from ordinary American suburban housewives to extraordinary children, from grieving young geologists and memory-haunted middle aged men, to British Midlands soccer stars and 22nd Century war heroes. Picano subtitled this collection of stylish, unique, and moving works "Tragic, Comic, Mystic & Horrific," and they are all that and more. The ten tales include prize winners as well as stories published here for the first time, and are as different from any standard "romances" as you can get, but they will linger in the mind and memory.

A telling novel about gay life after Stonewall, Late in the Season is one of the finest novels in the long career of one of the founding members of the Violet Quill Club. Set on Fire Island in late September, this is the story of an unlikely pair of friends--a gay composer in his late thirties and an eighteen-year-old schoolgirl--both of whom are trying to make sense of their complicated lives. But much more than this, it is a compelling portrait of a magical time and place, after the Stonewall riots opened up so many possibilities and before AIDS forever changed the face of the gay world. Reprint.

Stories within stories, secrets buried for generations, and the ghostly presence of a tragic figure from Civil War times haunts a seaside Rhode Island town and the lives of sexually precocious cousins Roger and Chas Lynch. When grown up Roger returns to live in the town's "haunted house" with his new wife, he discovers its cruel story. And the cousins' love triangle plays out eternal cycles of passion, jealousy, and perhaps also redemption. Reprint.

Noel Cummings's life is about to change irrevocably. After witnessing a brutal murder, Noel is recruited to assist the police by acting as the lure for a killer who has been targeting gay men. Undercover, Noel moves deeper and deeper into the dark side of Manhattan's gay life that stirs his own secret desires--until he forgets he is only playing a role.