Award-winning author William J. Mann blends fact and fiction in this unconventional novel about the nature of celebrity The Biograph Girl is Florence Lawrence, who gets her first big break in vaudeville as a tiny tot who can whistle like a man. By 1910 she's a legendary movie star, pursued by thousands of rabid fans. Just a few short decades later, she's all but forgotten, reduced to walk-ons at MGM. In 1938 she kills herself by ingesting a lethal dose of ant paste. Fast-forward fifty-nine years. A 107-year-old woman named Flo Bridgewood is discovered in a Catholic nursing home in Buffalo. Could the feisty chain smoker with the red satin bow in her hair be America's former sweetheart? Florence Lawrence is dead . . . isn't she? And if not, then whose body is in her grave? That's what journalist Richard Sheehan wants to find out as he and his identical twin brother, Ben, a documentary filmmaker, decide to cash in on a decades-old mystery. Sharing the...

At forty, long-time lovers Jeff O'Brien and Lloyd Griffith are the still-sexy poster boys for contented domesticity, running their P-town bed and breakfast together. But, with their wedding day approaching, can these two famously non-monogamous freethinkers really agree to "forsake all others"? Meanwhile, their best friend Henry Weiner has found love with Trent West--young, boyishly handsome, and charming. But Trent's presence is arousing intense feelings in all the men around him: desire, longing, recognition, need--and suspicion. And as Henry unearths Trent's secrets, he, Jeff and Lloyd must face their futures, alone and together...From Publishers WeeklyThe gift for character and architectonics Mann displays in his riveting film bios (including Kate) gets stripped out of his third pulpy Provincetown novel, following Where the Boys Are (2003). Mann switches focus from pop novelist Jeff O'Brien and hotelier Lloyd Griffith (longtime companions) to another Provincetown hottie, Jeff's best friend, Henry Weiner, whose complex trek from geek to hustler was a feature of the last book. Henry's a "washashore," as the locals call those who come to Provincetown to live year-round—adrift, restless, always on the prowl—and is managing Nirvana, the popular guesthouse co-owned by Jeff and Lloyd. Over the course of a Provincetown summer, Henry searches for Mr. Right, meeting and bedding a parade of sexy men: Luke is a sly, possibly psychotic would-be novelist who picks up Henry to get to Jeff; Martin is impossibly old at 45; Gale refuses to drop his pants on the first date; Shane, Henry's ex-, returns with a ring on his finger. Mann gets off some funny lines and smiles wryly on the longings of his characters. There's also a nice side plot in Jeff's nine-year-old nephew-ward JR, who struggles with his latent heterosexuality. Henry's odyssey, however, isn't sustaining, and the resolution falls flat. (Apr.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review"Deserves to stand alongside the best of Armistead Maupin and Felice Picano....Affirms Mann's status as one of gay fiction's major narrative powers." -- Christopher Rice

Jeff O'Brien and his friends return in this sequel to The Men from the Boys, William J. Mann's critically acclaimed debut novel about gay love and friendship Where the Boys Are opens in Manhattan on New Year's Eve, 1999. With the world on the cusp of the new millennium, Jeff O'Brien and his ex-lover Lloyd Griffith are grieving the loss of their friend and mentor David Javitz to AIDS. Desperate to forget, Jeff has become a fixture on the dance floor, surrounding himself with ever-younger boy toys like Henry Weiner. Henry, who was an insurance-company geek until Jeff transformed him into a hottie with washboard abs, is secretly in love with Jeff, who's got a thing for the mysterious and exotic Anthony Sabe. Lloyd, once the love of Jeff's life, has left his job to run a B&B with widow Eva Horner. Alternately narrated by Jeff, Lloyd, and Henry, Where the Boys Are is a high-octane trek through the gay party-circuit scene from...

A narrative account of Elizabeth Taylor's career, with particular attention paid to how the consummate movie star influenced and crafted her image over the years.

A gay man who fled his hometown in a cloud of scandal and guilt returns home to his estranged family—and the boy he left behind The first call is from Wally Day's estranged mother, begging him to come home. The second is from Sebastian Garafolo, a Brown's Mill cop Wally last spoke to when he confessed to having underage sex in the old apple orchard. Today, Garafolo is calling about something else entirely: Wally's cousin Kyle is missing. Twenty years ago, Wally fled his hometown in shame. He returns to a place that has barely changed, where he knows who walks the streets by day and who comes out at night. Now, as circumstances force him to confront the events that drove him to leave who he was far behind, Wally must also face dark truths about his family . . . about a shattering night and a crime that still haunts him and shaped the man he has become. If he has any hope of embracing the future, he must first make peace with his past.

Jeff O'Brien—bright, good-looking, and inching dangerously past thirty—is caught between two generations, the Baby Boomers and Generation X. He's been with his partner, Lloyd, for seven years now, but when Lloyd announces that there's no passion left between them, Jeff is sent into something of an existential frenzy. Desperate not to end up alone, Jeff haunts the dance floor and roadside rest stops, finding both the sordid and the sublime in anonymous encounters. But it's love he's after, so ultimately it's his bittersweet romance in Provincetown with Eduardo, twenty-two and a vision of gorgeous, wide-eyed youth, that lingers in his mind and seems to hold the answers he seeks. This is a story of a man coming to terms with the accelerating ambiguity of his world, where men die young but old age is actively devalued. It is the story of gay life today, the life being led by thousands of men trying desperately to keep up—and to discover if anything really unites...

The best-selling biographer of Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor tells the electrifying story of how Barbra Streisand transformed herself into the greatest star of her era, etching “an indelible portrait of the artist as a young woman” (Publishers Weekly).In 1960, she was a seventeen-year-old Brooklyn kid with plenty of talent but no connections and certainly no money; her mother brought her soup to make sure she stayed fed as she took acting classes and scraped out a living. Just four years later, Barbra Streisand was the top-selling female recording artist in America and the star of one of Broadway’s biggest hits. Now the acclaimed Hollywood biographer William Mann chronicles that dizzying ascent, telling the riveting behind-the-scenes story of how Streisand and her team transformed her from an unknown dreamer into a worldwide superstar.Drawing on the private papers of Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse, and interviewing scores of the friends and lovers who knew Barbara before she became Barbra, Mann recreates the vanished world of 1960s New York City and uncovers the truth behind the myths of her formative years. He shows us how Funny Girl was slowly altered, by Fosse and Robbins among others, from a Fanny Brice bio into a star-making vehicle for Streisand; takes us into the clubs and onto the set for her early nightclub and television appearances, including her torch-handing turn with Judy Garland; and introduces the canny marketing team whose strategies made her stardom seem inevitable. The Streisand who emerges is a revelation: a young woman who, for all her tough-skinned ambition, was surprisingly vulnerable in love.Everyone who has felt outside the gate, as she once did, remembers a time when the newness and difference of Barbra Streisand changed everything and rewrote all the rules. In Hello, Gorgeous, Mann incisively illuminates the woman before she became the icon and pays tribute to one of the world’s most beloved performers.