From Booklife –PUBLISHER’s WEEKLY

Ambidextrous: The Secret Lives of Children

By Felice Picano

Trailblazing novelist and poet Picano (author of Like People in History and The Lure, and co-author of The Joy of Gay Sex) shares, in this resurfaced memoir, a subversive, lubricious tale of his experience as a young boy in the 1950s with “most sinful of childhood crimes—precocious sexuality” and his wayward assembly of identity. Originally published in 1985 by Gay Presses of New York, and “destroyed by immolation” upon arrival in the UK, Picano’s controversial memoir-as-novel is, in this publication round, unedited, inviting readers into a proudly graphic coming-of-age, a revealing burst of sexual samizdat in incandescent prose.

Ambidextrous offers singularly vivid testimony of a queer child’s abrupt entrance to adulthood, plus some insight into the challenges of writing and publishing one’s truth in a “Puritan” America. Picano divides the memoir into three parts, set between fifth and seventh grade, corresponding to three different homosexual and heterosexual romantic situations and simultaneous intellectual and philosophical inflection points in the young author’s life. Picano the child is just as deeply affected by his premature sexual experiences as he is the works of Homer, Huxley, and Yeats, and in the concluding section, literature and sex combine to shocking effect. Scenes of troublemaking, school discipline, and disappointed parents all boast power, wit, and Picano’s brisk, assured storytelling and electric portraiture. Throughout, he captures each moment with striking detail—neighborhood gardens with “blue heads of flowers the size of a tricycle wheel”—and insights.

Picano does not shelter the reader from childhood sexual experiences, detailing adolescent encounters and “basement games” with candid precision but without judgment. Rather, Picano reveals the hidden story of how sex manifested in his early life and the lives of children in his vicinity in the mid ‘50s. His memoir offers visibility to this secret part of his upbringing and of human experience, and in doing so, builds a more complete picture of the human condition.

Takeaway: Memoir of a queer man’s intellectually and sexually active childhood

Slashed to Ribbons In Defense of Love and Other Stories

Felice Picano’s first collection of gay short stories spans the period 1975-1982 as published by the pioneering Gay Presses of New York. Read again forty years later, they are a delicious time-capsule of gay life mostly before AIDS and set in iconic gay meccas such as New York and Fire Island. In "Spinning", we get inside the head of a DJ busy spinning for the customers, tricking in his mind and deftly conjuring up the disco subculture which has since faded away. In "The Interrupted Recital", we eavesdrop into the classical music world where ego clashes lead to disastrous outcomes.

There are marvelous character portraits as in "Teddy", about a handsome Vietnam vet back home for a quick furlough.. Or the evocation of Christmas in multiple New York households in “Xmas in the Apple”. Longer works such as "Hunter", set in a writer's colony, are pure horror fiction. The longest piece, the novella "And Baby Makes Three", spreads its wings recreating Fire Island of the 1970s and features Picano's trademark surprises and miscues which make the tale memorable long after the last page is turned.

First published to acclaim in 1982, this new edition features a foreword by Eric Andrews-Katz (The Jesus Injection)

Trade paperback: 244 pgs • 978-1-951092-48-1
Kindle, Kobo, Nook, Apple
ePub: 978-1-951092-47-4
https://amzn.to/3tDxsSj

Drylands End

By Felice Picano

Set so far in the future that the exact location of the home planet of the Humes (humans) isn’t remembered, this book examines relationships between the sexes, and between species from a new perspective and with more than a touch of levity. The ruling class of women in much of the galaxy, the Matriarchy, in power for several millennia, is suddenly facing challenges on many fronts, not the least of which is a rebellion of the Cybers (android like machines and computers) who have a designed a virus that could wipe out hume-kind.

Ay’r Kerry Sanqq, a virtual orphan in a society that valorizes Motherhood, is sent in search of his father, a biologist who was banned from research and disappeared shortly after Ay’r birth. His avocation (no one has a job per se just interests they pursue) as a Species Ethologist, allows Ay’r the background he needs to engage the indigenous people on the planet Pelagia –over 90 percent ocean –where his father is rumored to be.

In the meanwhile, pitched battles are fought intrigues are developed, and treachery abounds in the rest of the galaxy as entire species face extinction. New alliances sometimes surprising, are formed, as the stultified social order begins to collapse. With its subjects of cloning and genetic manipulation, same sex marriages and other controversial issues, Dryland’s End remains as pertinent today as when it was first published.

In full-fledged sci-fi form, Picano has created entirely new civilizations, species, even new language forms for his society. A phenomenally well-written book.

--Virginia Gazette

THE BOOK of LIES
by Felice Picano

Available at Amazon.com
Print: 440 pgs • 978-1-951092-32-0
E-book at Kindle, Kobo, Nook and Apple

Felice Picano has birthed three dozen or so books – extraordinary in a kaleidoscopic way, covering fiction, memoir, plays, poetry – which never fail to entertain. He has a voice, a way to get under the skin, which one learns to embrace and welcome. His writing is jolly: even in situations of conflict, he's smiling.

THE BOOK OF LIES is a "literary mystery": a researcher tries to tease out the truth of The Purple Circle by mucking through manuscripts, author interviews and buried records. An homage and sendup of the real life Violet Quill – seven New York writers who met in each others' homes regularly to share works in progress which itself is celebrating its 40th anniversary – makes for a splendid page turner. Picano has a gift for creating believable characters one instantly feels right at home with. (It's remarkable his work has not been turned into movies.)

ReQueered Tales is honored to reissue THE BOOK OF LIES, our third work of this author; LIKE PEOPLE IN HISTORY (Jan 2020) and ONYX (Aug 2019) are already in print and digital. This edition includes a foreword by David Bergman, the scholar who documented the Violet Quill, with an afterword by Felice himself.

Much honored, in 2009, the Lambda Literary Foundation awarded Picano its Lifetime Achievement/Pioneer Award.

“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.” — The Mail on Sunday

“... funny, dark, sexy, shocking, and yes, smart. Set in the near future (‘decades after Stonewall’), the novel tells of a young scholar trying to make his academic bones on the literary bodies of the ‘Purple Circle’. Picano skewers the pedagogically pretentious with ease and wit. A wonderful novel, with some of Picano's best writing.” — Bay Area Reporter