CLEiS PRESS

We are in a time of transition in publishing and good work has great trouble in finding a home. The big houses are reluctant to publish gay literature in a way they weren’t ten years ago. However, the best work often finds other outlets.

Paul Russell wrote an amazing new novel, The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov about Vladimir Nabokov’s gay brother. The mainstream houses passed on it, but he sold it to Cleis Press, a small house specializing in gay and lesbian erotica, who published it in 2011 and did an excellent job in getting it out in the world.

Bob Smith did an extraordinary comic fantasy, Remembrance of Things I Forgot, a time travel novel that combines science fiction with autobiographical fiction and political satire. This highly commercial, audience-friendly book could only be published by University of Wisconsin Press.

Chulito by Charles Rice-Gonzalez, a terrific debut novel about gay love among “hoodrats” in the Bronx, was published by the new queer press, Magus.

And Personal Saviors by Wesley Gibson, a darkly comic novel about growing up gay in the super-religious South circa 1969, was published by another new queer press, Chelsea Station Editions.

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