True Stories

Portraits from My Past

From author Felice Picano, co-founder of the path breaking Violet Quill Club, comes a new collection of memoirs, many of which have never appeared in print. Picano presents sweet and sometimes controversial anecdotes of his precocious childhood, odd, funny, and often disturbing encounters from before he found his calling as a writer and later as one of the first GLBT publishers. Throughout are his delightful encounters and surprising relationships with the one-of-a-kind and the famous – including Tennessee Williams, W.H. Auden, Charles Henri Ford, Bette Midler, and Diana Vreeland.

Published by Chelsea Station Editions
ISBN: 978-0-9844707-7-8
$16

Praise for the memoirs of Felice Picano

“What makes his memoir invaluable and enjoyable is his willingness to dish.” - The New York Times

“Compelling and engrossing, it will conjure up memories of everyone's adolescence, straight or gay.” -Out Magazine

Recent Reviews for True Stories

by Jim Piechota for The Bay Area Reporter - 04/07/2011

Franz Kafka once wrote, "It is hard to tell the truth, for although there 'is' one, it is alive and constantly changes its face." Telling truths is something that popular, prolific author and memoirist Felice Picano does extremely well. This is most evident in True Stories: Portraits from My Past, his latest collection of expanded personal essays and life reflections. While some are new, many of these pieces have enjoyed publication in other anthologies, but Picano presents them in their unedited form, free from the shackles of word counts and the red editing pencil.

In the introduction, Picano bows to the "strange, wondrous, or simply nutty" people who have passed through his life, since they're the ones who helped him become the writer that he is today. By extension, his writings are a grand gesture to "those I related to, over the years."

( see more of the review here )

Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing

Reveiw from: Lambda Literary.org
The leader in LGBT book reviews, author interviews, opinion and news since 1989

by Dan Lopez on June 27, 2011

In his introduction to Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing (University of Wisconsin Press), co-editor Lázaro Lima defines this slim volume’s scope as an opening statement in a growing conversation, one that confronts the bias of mainstream American cultural constructs and seeks “to envision a different kind of national culture.” It’s a bit like shooting at a moving target as what it means to be Latino and queer in America continues to evolve toward (presumably) some distant equilibrium. All the same, Lima and fellow editor Felice Picano have put together a tight collection of stories and critical thought chronicling the various ways we live today.

“Imitation of Selena” by Ramón García tells the tragic tale of Pesticida, an aging queen obsessed with the slain Tex-Mex singer, and her house of drag children in Corpus Christi, Texas. Cuban-American novelist Achy Obejas contributes “Kimberle,” a harrowing account of two Sapphic friends in an Indiana town yearly terrorized by a serial killer. Charles Rice-González depicts a group of trans bandits in the Bronx projects. Susana Chávez-Silverman’s “Magnetic Island, Sueño Cronica” is an epistolary story told in Spanglish, wonderfully illustrating the editors’ refusal to italicize non-English words on the grounds that Spanish is not a foreign language in the United States, but, rather, our second, unofficial language. It’s an important distinction, and one Lima and Picano stress. While selections like Uriel Quesada’s “I Leave Tomorrow, I Come Back Yesterday” appear here in translation, the majority of the work was written in English for an English-speaking audience. After all, this is not foreign literature. The anthology is designed to showcase a unique and emerging native literature, the “different kind of national culture” Lima references in the introduction. A literature being produced by LGBT writers whose perspective is enriched by a mother (or, often, grandmother) tongue that is Iberian in root and Caribbean/African/South & Central American in flavor, and that is consummately Americano.

EDITED By: Lázaro Lima and Felice Picano
University of Wisconsin Press
June 2011
LC: 2010041228 PS 288 pp <click to buy>

To continue reading the review at Lambda Literary, <click here>

Van Gogh's Ear

vangoghsear cover

Vol. 7: The Supernatural Edition

EDITOR: Felice Picano

The seventh and final edition of the Van Gogh's Ear anthology, "The Supernatural Edition," focuses on works featuring the weird, wonderful, imaginary, and thoroughly supernatural. Full of stories, poems, artwork, and various creative essays, the culmination of the Van Gogh's Ear anthology is anything but a smooth, predictable ride; rather, the range of styles and themes sweeps the reader away, promising an unforgettable experience. The 'supernatural' theme appears both overtly and subtly, in spirituality and imagination, in experiences both real and ethereal. Edited by Felice Picano, this volume features works by an international contingent of authors, including Jorge Artajo, Camille Feinberg, Fern C.Z. Carr, Samuel Ace, Saint James Harris Wood, Edmund White, Imani Tolliver, McArthur Gunther, Steven Reigns, Reginald T. Jackson, and Jayanta Mahapatra. Particular treats include a social commentary by Plutarch, a short story by Turkish writer Serdar Türkeli, and a nonfiction piece about riding on Juan Peron's coffin by travel journalist Michael Luongo.

Publisher: French Connection Press

ISBN: 978-2-914853-118

RETAIL: $ 19.00

Buy it HERE

A NOVEL IN PROGRESS: From an Age of Gold

"THE WRESTLING MATCH"

There was to be a royal wedding celebrated in Phthia and by royal ukase no one in the city might be absent from that.

This I heard from Aphrocleia, my hostess, the owner of taverna where I had installed myself, hidden, as paying guest. She told me that the old king had died of a fall on his great charcoal black horse while hunting, only a few weeks before my arrival. His only son, Eurytion, had succeeded him. Barely eighteen years of age, the lad was said to be already as kingly as his more pleasure-loving sire had been. Handsome, and generous, wise and courteous, if he had any fault at all, the always critical Aphrocleia declared, it was that he listened to the advice of his three older sisters over that of the male elders of the royal court. But this was not really unanticipated: the three princesses were already half grown when his mother had died, soon after giving birth to him. Together they had raised him, so naturally enough, respectful Eurytion treated the sisters as if they were his mother.

They wished him married off to one of their own friends, a woman of the second best family of Phthia, named Polydora, some years older, and beautiful, if already a widow and with a daughter. Many Phthians assumed that Eurytion would be ruled by his wife, and thus by his sisters. But then, aside from his sport, the old king he succeeded had been secretly swayed in most matters by his own three wise daughters and most thought that no harm had or would come to Phthia because of it. So matters could be worse. If the young king could keep the wife pregnant repeatedly she would be less interfering, or so Aphrocleia declared, and added that the king seemed virile enough for that easy task.

Falling

In Development

Act 1 complete
Two act full length play.
Two males.
Modern day Lower Manhattan & the Hollywood Hills