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When the Lambda Literary Award nominations were recently announced [in 1996], Felice Picano was cited in two different categories. Over the past 20 years Mr. Picano has not only been a prolific writer in a number of different styles and genres, he has also run two gay presses, lectured extensively, and managed to lead a busy and active life outside of gay literature. At the news of his dual nominations, I phoned Felice, and he agreed to take a break from working on his latest epic to chat for a few moments.

Keehnen: Congratulations on your recent double Lambda Literary Award nominations for Like People in History (Best Gay Men's Fiction) and Dryland's End (Best Gay Men's Fantasy/Science Fiction).

Picano: Thank you. I'm very proud of both books.

Keehnen: As the author of 17 books including Smart as the Devil, Ambidextrous, and The Lure, do you find a common theme running throughout your fiction?

Picano: 17! I'd say it's the outsider or rather "ordinary person" or "man on the street" who's put into an extraordinary situation including a whole life history as in Like People in History. I hate this word, but it seems fairly universal, but also inexhaustible.

Keehnen: After 20 years as a published author, what do you consider the pinnacle of your writing career?

Review by Kevin Brannon
February 19, 2015

In his new memoir, Nights at Rizzoli, Felice Picano resists the temptation to think of late night Manhattan as an “elite city.” However, it is an apt phrase for the world he inhabited in the early and mid-’70s, when he worked nights at the old Rizzoli Bookstore, just south of the Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue. These were years in which a night on the job might involve a brush with haughty Mick Jagger or a sweetly unassuming Jackie Onassis, Greta Garbo or Salvador Dalí. Years that left him free to roam the city after hours, to explore the gay bars and the back rooms of the West Village, the dilapidated piers along the Hudson where gay men gathered for sex all night long. Nights at Rizzoli is a brief, sketchbook record of Picano’s encounters in both realms of a New York City that feels far more glamorous, dangerous and free, and somehow more fraught with history, than the one we know today.

See more at: Lambda Literary

Damian Serbu - Lamda Literary Reviews
October 13, 2013

The maturation of LGBT literature provides a vast array of authors, genres, and styles from which a reader chooses what books to enjoy. What a pleasure to see such diversity for our community, which once struggled to publish even the best of writers. New authors abound, coming from a solid amount of publishers. Yet within the new and unique, I often long for the familiar, the safe and sure hands of a polished writer known for creating literary classics that will always remain important works of gay literature. Picking up Felice Picano’s latest volume, 20^th Century Un-Limited, provided this kind of comfort and assurance. I can’t imagine being in the hands of a better storyteller.

Picano journeys down a daring and dangerous path in these two novellas, which take up time travel as their principle subject. In the first, Christopher Hall begins in the current era, enjoying life just past middle age, when a strange encounter leads him on an expedition back to the 1930s. The second story introduces the mystery of disappearing people, all somehow connected through different ages by a plot of land in Wisconsin. Thank the writing gods for Picano’s skill because in a less adept hand, these time-bending scenarios could confuse the reader or prove so maddeningly unrealistic that even the most fervent science fiction enthusiast’s head might spin. Instead, Picano weaves in and out of different decades, centuries even, with ease, explaining the plot and setting so effortlessly that it reads as clearly as a chronological history.

- See more at: Lamda Literary

Twelve O’Clock Tales, by Felice Picano
Bold Strokes Books/Liberty Editions.
236 pages, $16.95 paperback

Book Review by Richard Labonte
Gay Calgary Magazine
From July 2012 (Online)

Think of Picano as a queer literary renaissance man. He writes plays and screenplays, poetry and memoirs, sex manuals and sexy thrillers, historical novels and – this is his fourth collection – short stories. These 13, he notes in a preface, pay homage to writers he savored as a young man (and still reads), the likes of Edgar Allen Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Saki, Algernon Blackwood, Walter de la Mare and others of their dark, ghostly, eerie and sometimes downright weird ilk. In that sense, Picano is also something of a literary chameleon – there are echoes of each of these writers, and all of those sentiments, in this solid collection. The first, "Synapse," is a creepily science-fictional account of how an elderly man has come to inhabit a boy’s body; the last, "The Perfect Setting," is a masterpiece of detection, wherein an obsessive narrator solves the mystery of a landscape painter’s murder. Not a one of the stories is like another, such is Picano’s wide-ranging imagination; what they have in common is their power and their polish.