The White Book (Le Livre Blanc)

Author	Philippe Besson
ISBN	1501197878

The award-winning, bestselling French novel by Philippe Besson about an affair between two teenage boys in 1984 France, translated with subtle beauty and haunting lyricism by the iconic and internationally acclaimed actress/writer Molly Ringwald.

We drive at high speed along back roads,...

Author	André Gide
ISBN	0142180025

In The Immoralist , André Gide presents the confessional account of a man seeking the truth of his own nature. The story's protagonist, Michel, knows nothing about love when he marries the gentle Marceline out of duty to his father. On the couple's honeymoon to Tunisia, Michel becomes very ill, and...

Author	Marcel Proust
ISBN	0143039318

Sodom and Gomorrah – now in a superb translation by John Sturrock – takes up the theme of homosexual love, male and female, and dwells on how destructive sexual jealousy can be for those who suffer it. Proust's novel is also an unforgiving analysis of both the decadent high society of Paris, and the...

Author	Joris-Karl Huysmans
ISBN	0140447636

With a title translated either as Against Nature or as Against The Grain, this wildly original fin-de-siècle novel follows its sole character, Des Esseintes, a decadent, ailing aristocrat who retreats to an isolated villa where he indulges his taste for luxury and excess. Veering between nervous...

Author

Alan Warner

Morvern Callar, a low-paid employee in the local supermarket in a desolate and beautiful port town in the west of Scotland, wakes one morning in late December to find her strange boyfriend has committed suicide and is dead on the kitchen floor. Morvern's reaction is both intriguing and immoral. What...

Author

Clare Ashton

ASIN B0070ZEUCC moved to the most recent edition here

Lucy is haunted by the death of her partner, Jake, and lives in paranoid fear and reclusion. She lives in a small, introverted village in Cornwall called Pennance, and is surrounded by Jake's family and memories of him. She feels intensely...

Author

James Purdy

A powerful story of love turned round, of passion and fierce discovery, of lives illuminated by flickering violence.

As Purdy spins the story of the extraordinary symbiotic relationship between four boys in a remote West Virginia mountain town, led by the seemingly hypnotic power of the...

Author	Joe Brainard
ISBN	0140245219

If there could be an ideal task in creative writing it is this one:
write a story or a poem where every sentence begins "I remember" and tell the truth.

The lesson here is simple: the more intimate is your confessions, the more connection they establish, the more power they generate, the more...