Terry Mangan Memorial Library

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...

"Boy meets boy. Boys become friends. Boys fall in love. Shy and softhearted Charlie Spring sits next to rugby player Nick Nelson in class one morning. A warm and intimate friendship follows, and that soon develops into something more for Charlie, who doesn't think he has a chance. But Nick is struggling with feelings of his own, and as the two grow closer and take on the ups and downs of high school, they come to understand the surprising and...

The story of four teenagers playing deadly games with drugs, sex, and one another. Behind a facade of tough cynicism, on a raging search for kicks, they explore the hot, dusty city, bent on trouble. There are three "angels"--Shell, Cob, and Manny, and their recruit Jerry, who becomes the fourth. Hovering in that uncertain limbo between childhood and adulthood, the four angels maintain a precarious balance among themselves and with the outside world....

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.

When seventeen-year-old Ethan Whitley attends an elite New England prep school, he is invited into a world of privilege and desire where he discovers the price of betrayal when he is drawn into an investigation of the death of another student.

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 friendship of two young homosexuals united by their alienation from the rest of the community. The community is Pryor, a bleak company town in Oklahoma where people work for a rendering factory, that is making fertilizer from animal leftovers.

Winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. On a snowy Thanksgiving day in North Carolina, a dreamy eight-year-old is pushed headlong into the adult world by a violent quarrel between his parents. Jim Grimsley's brilliant first novel unfolds in a strikingly unconventional way—as the boy tells himself his own story. A shattering story of heartbreak, violence, and the endurance of the spirit. "Tell everyone."—Dorothy...