Patrick Hunt: Caravaggio

UK 2004, 164 pp., brochure, € 19.19
Kostenloser Versand innerhalb Österreichs.
Caravaggio (1571-1610) was the most revolutionary artist of the Italian Baroque. Consistently emphasising the humanity of his religious subjects, he established a new canon. The intensity and drama of his chiaroscuro style is matched only by his life. Outlaw, heretic, murderer and sensualist are a few of the charges brought against him by his contemporaries. Given the paucity of verifiable biographical documents, Caravaggio remains mysterious and elusive to modern admirers. Patrick Hunt interprets Caravaggio's complicated religious and classical imagery while anchoring his art in his life taking a holistic approach to Caravaggio and his work. Hunt shows Caravaggio as the poster boy of bad behaviour he was, but he resists the temptation to interpret him by that dark light alone.

Paul Monette: Becoming a Man

USA 2004, 278 pp., brochure, € 13.89
Kostenloser Versand innerhalb Österreichs.
Paul Monette first made a name for himself in 1978 with his debut novel »Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll«, a comic romp with serious overtones. He established himself as a writer of popular fiction with three more novels before he and his lover were both diagnosed with HIV. In 1988 he wrote »On Borrowed Time«, a memoir of living with AIDS and of his lover's death. - A child of the 1950s from a small New England town. »Perfect Paul« earns staight A´s and scholarships and shines in social and literary pursuits, all the while keeping a secret - from himself and the rest of the world. Struggling to be or at least to imitate a straight man, through Ivy League halls of privilege and bohemian travels abroad, loveless intimacy, and unrequited passion. Paul Monette was haunted, and finally saved, by a dream - »The thing I´d never even seen: two men in love and laughing«. This searingly honest, witty, and humane merging of memoir and manifesto has become the definitive coming out story - and a classic of the coming-of-age genre. It was awarded the 1992 National Book Award for nonfiction.

Darwin Porter: Katharine the Great

A Lifetime of Secrets Revealed. USA 2004, 569 pp., brochure, € 16.59
Kostenloser Versand innerhalb Österreichs.
»The Advocate« had thrown down the gauntlet for someone willing to go behind the carefully constructed public persona Hepburn protected throughout her years in film. Celebrity expose author Darwin Porter accepted the challenge, and released »Katherine the Great«, a mammoth volume presenting a wealth of evidence that the late, great Kate was not necessarily straight. »Katharine the Great« takes an in-depth look at a Hepburn the public never knew, presenting information gleaned from interviews with Joan Crawford, Tallulah Bankhead, Patricia Peardon, Truman Capote, Garson Kanin and his wife Ruth Gordon, Hepburn’s »deflowerer« Kenneth MacKenna, and many more. In this 570-page unauthorized biography, Porter delves into the spicy sexual conquests of the Connecticut born and bred actress and her cadre of high-profile companions. Hepburn was indeed bisexual, and that she and American Express heiress Laura Harding conducted a closeted, long-term relationship from 1928 until Harding's death in 1994, a relationship that over-lapped her »lavender marriage« to Ludlow O. Smith who himself had gay affairs.

Richard Chamberlain: Shattered Love

USA 2004, 247 pp., brochure, € 14.79
Kostenloser Versand innerhalb Österreichs.
Through decades of performances on TV and in film, Richard Chamberlain has epitomized the ideal leading man. But despite his worldwide acclaim in »The Thorn Birds« and »Shogun«, the actor himself has never led a life of easy confidence but lived in constant fear that the »real« Richard would one day be discovered. Richard Chamberlain recounts his journey as an impressionable boy who stumbled into the Hollywood of big studios, big money, and big personas. Through long days on the set and glittering evenings on the town with Joan Crawford, Princess Margaret, Elizabeth Taylor, and many other colorful characters, Chamberlain played his Golden Boy role. Now he longes to reconcile his deepest self with his public persona - including his being gay, a secret he has guarded until now.

Nadine D. Amon, Alexandra Papai: Alfons Haider

Ö 2004, 159 S., geb., € 16.90
Kostenloser Versand innerhalb Österreichs.
Seit seinem Coming-out ist Alfons Haider das Aushängeschild des schwulen Österreichs. Als Kabarettist, Musicalstar, Schauspieler und TV-Moderator konnte er schon in der Zeit davor große Erfolge erzielen. Inzwischen verfolgt der ehemalige Traumschwiegersohn ein neues Image, das von seinen Ballberichterstattungen (Opernball und Life Ball) über seine Rolle als Rechtspolitiker im »Kaisermühlenblues« bis hin zu Auftritten in Frauenkleidern (als Diana Ross) reicht. In diesem Personality-Band erfährt der Leser nicht nur alles über die beruflichen Stationen des Schönlings, sondern auch viel über den privaten Alfons Haider (z.B. über seine Beziehung zu »Stoffi«, seine Coming-out-Erfahrungen, übers Kinderkriegen und das Tragen von Frauenkleidern).

Katharine Hepburn: Ich

Geschichten meines Lebens. D 2004, 394 S., Pb, € 10.23
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Neuauflage der Memoiren der Hepburn, die im vergangenen Jahr verstorben ist. Die Hollywood-Diva und vierfache Oscar-Preisträgerin ging bedingungslos ihren eigenen Weg und eckte mit ihrem öffentlich zelebrierten Individualismus immer wieder an. Doch sie ließ sich nicht unterkriegen. Die Memoiren zeigen eine mutige Individualisten, die es liebte, gegen den Strom zu schwimmen, und die gerne gegen Konventionen verstieß. In ihren selbstironisch vorgetragenen Erinnerungen äußert sich eine beeindruckende Persönlichkeit, die den Film des 20. Jahrhunderts mit ihrer markanten Arbeit mit geprägt hat.

Merlin Holland: Oscar Wilde

USA 2007, 384 pp., cloth, € 26.69
Kostenloser Versand innerhalb Europas.
Merlin Holland's »Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters« is, in effect, a selected letters, 384 manageable pages rather than the 1,270 of the »Complete Letters«. This has necessitated the omission of »De profundis«, all 50,000 words of it. That apart, it is a judicious and representative selection. Telling the Wilde story in his own words, this is a calm approach that conveys the heights to which Wilde rose, which then rendered so extreme his descent to the depths. Wonderfully fluent in style, the letters bear that most familiar of Wildean hallmarks - the lightest of touches for the most serious of subjects. He comments openly on his life and his work from the early years of undergraduate friendship, through his year-long lecture tour in America as a striving young »Professor of Aesthetics«, to the short period of fame and success in the early 1890s, when he corresponded with many leading political, literary and artistic figures of the time. Disgrace and imprisonment followed, but even in adversity his humour did not desert him.

Andrew Wilson: Beautiful Shadow

UK 2004, 536 pp., Pb, € 13.95
Kostenloser Versand innerhalb Österreichs.
Patricia Highsmith, the celebrated author of »Strangers on a Train« and »The Talented Mr Ripley«, was renowned as a suspense writer during her lifetime, yet she was notoriously evasive about the sources of her fiction and refused to discuss her private life. After her death in 1995, a vast archive of Highsmith's diaries, notebooks and letters was found. Extraordinary in their candour, they detail the links between her life and her work. Drawing on these intimate papers, together with material gleaned from her closest friends and lovers, the author has written the first biography of Patricia Highsmith described by Graham Greene as the »poet of apprehension«. Wilson illuminates the dark corners of Highsmith's life, casts light on mysteries of the creative process and reveals the secrets that the writer chose to keep hidden until after her death.