Felice Picano

Bright, ambitious and handsome, Ross Ohrenstedt, a high-flier in the fashionable field of Queer Studies is flourishing amid the back-stabbing, resentments and petty intrigues of academia. He has just taken up a prestigious university post in Los Angeles and has been appointed to oversee the collection of the papers and works of Damon Von Slyke, prominent man of letters and leading light of the gay literary salon known as the Purple Circle. Sorting through the papers, Ross stumbles across a 'lost' work by an unknown author. His quest to identify the mystery writer and achieve the glory of scholastic tenure unveils the lives and wild times of a group of writers who in the 1970s and 1980s broke new ground in the creation of a gay literary sensibility. But the truth contained within THE BOOK OF LIES is even more surprising... With sharp wit, powerfully unexpected revelations and a luscious sense of place and character, Felice Picano's new novel explores the ties of love, friendship and betrayal with rewarding depth and emotional honesty. With a luscious sense of place and character and with powerfully unexpected revelations, Felice Picano's new novel explores the ties of love, friendship and betrayal with rewarding depth and emotional honesty.

Flamboyant, mercurial Alistair Dodge and steadfast, cautious Roger Sansarc are second cousins who are both gay and whose lifelong friendship begins when they first meet as nine-year-old boys in 1954. At crucial moments in their personal histories their lives intersect, and each discovers his own unique - and uniquely gay- identity. Through the lens of their complex, tumultuous, yet enduring relationship - and their involvement with the handsome model, poet and decorated Vietnam vet Matt Loguidice, whom they both love - Felice Picano chronicles and celebrates gay life and subculture over the last half of the twentieth century. From Malibu Beach in its palmist surfer days to the legendary parties at Fire Island Pines in the 1970s, from San Francisco during its gayest era to AIDS activism in Greenwich Village in the 1990s, Like People in History presents 'the heroic and funny saga of the last three decades by someone who saw everything and forgot nothing' (Edmund White).