Terry Mangan Memorial Library

The “wise, wildly funny story” of a self-destructive writer’s lost weekend by a Pulitzer Prize–winning, New York Times–bestselling author (Chicago Tribune).
A wildly successful first novel made Grady Tripp a young star, and seven years later he still hasn’t grown up. He’s now a writing professor in Pittsburgh, plummeting through middle age, stuck with an unfinishable manuscript,...

A Boy's Own Story, with equal parts stunning lyricism and unabashed humor, traces a nameless narrator's coming-of-age in the 1950s. Struggling with his homosexuality, the narrator seeks the consolations of a fantastic imagination and fills his head with romantic expectations (“I believed without a doubt in a better world, which was adulthood or New York or Paris or love.”) His distant, divorced parents exacerbate his hunger for emotional...

Third in the George Miles Cycle. Simultaneously deadpan and queasily raw, Try is the story of Ziggy, the adopted teenage son of two sexually abusive fathers. He turns from both of these men to his uncle, who sells pornographic videos on the black market, and to his best friend, a junkie whose own vulnerability inspires in Ziggy a fierce and awkward devotion. Terminally insecure and yet inured to sexual brutality, Ziggy questions his two fathers,...

A radio personality and a sick boy who has been abused by his parents form a complicated relationship. Troubling questions arise from this situation and the ordered life of the radio personality spins out of control.

In a small Southern town, Nathan, an unloved boy abused by his father forms a friendship with Roy, a boy next door. While studying algebra on Roy's bed, they engage in sexual acts, run off together, and drama follows. By the author of Winter Birds

"At the heart of Dennis Cooper's novel lies Larry, a teenager wrestling not only with his sexuality and the implications of a physical relationship with his younger brother, but with the very point of his existence. He is numb to most of what surrounds him." "As the book opens, Larry has been paid $500 by an older student to kill a fellow pupil and retrieve the boy's notebook. It seems simple enough. However, once Larry ventures into the notebook,...

Zeus is the lowest of the low: a hitman, and muscle for a monster who sells children into sexual slavery. It was only because he learned from the guy who used to do the same job, though, that he made it off the streets. It isn't until he is sent to transport yet another boy that he discovers something that cannot be true, and yet somehow, is: this boy is Zeus' child-self, the part he had to let die to stay alive through the horror, somehow made physically...

"The time is the late 1970s - an age of gas shortages, head shops, and Saturday Night Fever. The place, suburban New Jersey. At a time when the teenagers around him are coming of age, Robin MacKenzie is coming undone. While "normal boys" are into cars, sports, and bullying their classmates, Robin enjoys day trips to New York City with his elegant mother, spinning fantastic tales for her amusement in an intimate ritual he has come to love. He dutifully...