Winner of the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies (BACLS) 2017 Edited Collection Prize This book is a challenging and engaging collection of original essays on the novels of Alan Hollinghurst, Britain’s foremost gay writer and the English novel’s master stylist. The essays engage the precarious and shifting relationship between sex and literary sensibility in his novels and, thus, also attempt to establish the parameters of a new critical discourse for future research on Hollinghurst’s novel, queer theory and the contemporary literary representations of masculinity and sexuality. By coupling the consideration of Hollinghurst’s aesthetics, his sensuously evocative style, to an interrogation of the social, political and sexual currents in his texts, the contributors of this collection provide distinctive interpretations of Hollinghurst’s novels, from Hollinghurst’s uncovering of a gay artistic heritage to his re-signification of earlier English literary styles, from his engagement with the Symbolist fin de siècle to his critique of aestheticism, etc., whilst paying close attention to the formally innovative qualities of his texts.

Beginning with Somerset Maugham’s innovative, sexually dissident South Seas novel and tales and Alfred Hitchcock’s gay-inflected revisiting of the Jack the Ripper sensation in silent film, this book considers the continuing presence of the past in future-oriented work of the 1930s and the Second World War by Sylvia Townsend Warner, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and the playwright and novelist, Patrick Hamilton. The final three chapters carry the discussion to the present in analyses of works by lesbian, postcolonial, and gay authors such as Sarah Waters, Amitav Ghosh, and Alan Hollinghurst. Focusing on questions about temporality and changes in gender and sexuality, especially gay and lesbian, straight and queer, following the rejection of the Victorian patriarchal marriage model, this study examines the continuing influence of late Victorian Aestheticist and Decadent culture in Modernist writing and its permutations in England.

"The "spell" of the title is both the power of drugs, at the heart of the book, and the "sex-magic" that variously possesses - but then deserts - each of its main characters." -- The Guardian Discover this ‘sparkling celebration of sexual intrigue’ (Telegraph, London) from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Line of Beauty. The Spell is a comedy of sexual manners that follows the interlocking affairs of four men: Robin, an architect in his late forties, who is trying to build an idyllic life in Dorset with his younger lover, Justin; Robin's 22 year old son Danny, a volatile beauty who lives for clubbing and casual sex; and the shy Alex, who is Justin's ex-boyfriend. As each in turn falls under the spell of romance or drugs, country living or rough trade, a richly ironic picture emerges of the clashing imperatives of modern gay life. At once lyrical, sceptical and romantic, The Spell confirms Alan Hollinghurst as one of Britain's most important novelists.

Winner of the Man Booker Prize Named a Best Book of the Century by The New York Times Book Review International Bestseller From acclaimed author Alan Hollinghurst, a sweeping novel about class, sex, and money during four extraordinary years of change and tragedy. In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby-whom Nick had idolized at Oxford-and Catherine, who is highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions. As the boom years of the eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in the world of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of this glamorous family. His two vividly contrasting love affairs, one with a young black man who works as a clerk and one with a Lebanese millionaire, dramatize the dangers and rewards of his own private pursuit of beauty, a pursuit as compelling to Nick as the desire for power and riches among his friends. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly comic, this is a major work by one of our finest writers.

Obsessed with one of his pupils, teacher Edward Manners becomes embroiled in affairs with two other men, but only after discovering the life and work of Symbolist painter Edgard Orst does he come to understand the implications of obsession. Reprint.

Winner of the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies (BACLS) 2017 Edited Collection Prize This book is a challenging and engaging collection of original essays on the novels of Alan Hollinghurst, Britain’s foremost gay writer and the English novel’s master stylist. The essays engage the precarious and shifting relationship between sex and literary sensibility in his novels and, thus, also attempt to establish the parameters of a new critical discourse for future research on Hollinghurst’s novel, queer theory and the contemporary literary representations of masculinity and sexuality. By coupling the consideration of Hollinghurst’s aesthetics, his sensuously evocative style, to an interrogation of the social, political and sexual currents in his texts, the contributors of this collection provide distinctive interpretations of Hollinghurst’s novels, from Hollinghurst’s uncovering of a gay artistic heritage to his re-signification of earlier English literary styles, from his engagement with the Symbolist fin de siècle to his critique of aestheticism, etc., whilst paying close attention to the formally innovative qualities of his texts.

The dazzling first novel from the best-selling, Booker Prize-Winning author of The Line of Beauty and The Sparsholt Affair. An enthralling, darkly erotic novel of homosexuality before the scourge of AIDS; an elegy, possessed of chilling clarity, for ways of life that can no longer be lived with impunity. The Swimming-Pool Library focuses on the friendship of two men: William Beckwith, a young gay aristocrat who leads a life of privilege and promiscuity, and Lord Nantwich, an elderly man searching for someone to write his biography and inherit his traditions.