Marking the 40th Anniversary of the Violet Quill
LOS ANGELES—October 13, 2020—Widely celebrated, this literary mystery is a tour-de-force of villainous machinations, savage wit, sleight-of-hand, and an ending that surprises right up to the final line. (No peeking!)
— The Mail on Sunday
“Based on Picano’s involvement with the Violet Quill Club (which included Edmund White and Andrew Holleran), this is an absorbing Henry James-style comedy of manners about how even when some writers find their way out of the closet, others still get left behind.”
Bright, ambitious, and handsome, Ross Ohrenstedt is a high flier in the fashionable field of queer studies. He has just taken a prestigious university position in Los Angeles and has been appointed to oversee the collection of papers and works of a leading light of the gay literary salon known as the Purple Circle. Ross stumbles across a lost work by an unknown author and his quest to identify the mystery writer and achieve the glory of scholastic tenure unveils increasingly bizarre and unbalanced facts about a group of writers who in the 1970s and 1980s broke new ground in the creation of a gay literary sensibility. But the dark truth contained within The Book of Lies is even more startling.
First published to acclaim in 1998, this new edition features a foreword by David Bergman (The Violet Hour). “Leave it to Felice Picano to add a walloping dose of melodrama and intrigue to a tale already redrawing genre boundaries … What Picano does is take an academic mystery (subject matter that might have proved tedious or solipsistic in lesser hands) and morphs it into something new – a page-turning, often campy, occasionally serious critique of academia and historical truth, literary celebrity, and the imminent future of America.”
— Philadelphia Tribune
With biting wit and a lush sense of place and character, Felice Picano’s daring novel is at once a stylish mystery, a comical roman-à-clef, and a wicked send-up of the new Ivory Tower.
First published to acclaim in 1998, this new edition features a foreword by David Bergman (The Violet Hour).
THE BOOK OF LIES ebook:
Amazon: https://amzn.to/3gRBhJJ
Kobo: https://bit.ly/2EZvzbi
Nook: https://bit.ly/34YArbW
Apple: https://apple.co/31Qr0Jt
US $5.95 • CAN $7.95 • UK £4.95 • EU €5.95 • AU $8.95
Trade Paperback, 440 pgs:
ISBN 978-1-951092-31-3
https://amzn.to/3gRBhJJ
US $19.95 • CAN $24.95 • UK £15.95
