Lethe's gay titles include an array of
gay-positive novels, poetry,
erotica and literature for gay men & lesbians. Lethe's new imprint,
Bear Bones Books, will offer
fiction and
non-fiction titles about Gay Men's Bear Identity. Lethe is one of the
world's
leading publishers of gay and lesbian spirituality, poetry, and
independent fiction. Below is a list of Lethe Press's books of
interest to Bears.
Bear
Bones Books catalogue, Summer 2011
a printed catalogue of Bear Bones Books titles is available
from MagCloud for the cost of $1.60 plus postage.
A digital version is available free.
Bear Books editor, Ron Suresha has a new book of photographs, FUR:
THE LOVE OF HAIR
from German publisher Bruno Gmünder,
soon available everywhere!
Bear Bones Books
Bear Bone Books is an imprint
of
Lethe Press, featuring books about gay rural life and/or books about
Bear Identity. Ron Suresha is editor of Bear Bones Books for more about Bear Bones Books, visit:
BearCity: The Novel,
based on the award-winning feature-length movie, follows the funny,
romantic, and often dramatic adventures of a tight-knit pack of bears,
cubs, and friends in New York City as they gear up for a big party
weekend. A hirsute Sex and the City set in the City’s gay men’s
“Bear” scene, the BearCity story brings together these men, their
friends, tricks, and lovers, and a cast of colorful, hirsute
characters. They experience comical mishaps, lusty and romantic
encounters, and an impressive variety of male body types. Using satire
and humor, the novel explores these men’s self-image issues and pokes
fun at aspects of urban gay male lifestyles, all while celebrating the
worldwide community of men who call themselves Bears.
BearCity: The Novel
is an urbane, sexy story that will tickle your furry bone and touch
your heart—and includes a special section of furbulous
behind-the-scenes photographs chosen by the author and director.
All men hold secrets. It’s part of their nature. The
mystery of a man, like his musky, masculine scent, is discovered only
when he meets naked with another man.
The janitor in the college bathrooms late at night and the professor he
meets there. The grizzled mountain men in the Old West sharing a
bathtub in a hotel room. The neighbor kid’s Dad in his underwear,
drinking and watching videos in the basement. The thickset,
gray-bearded homeless daddybear in the alley behind the house. The
shadowy priest confronting the young man confessing his sins. The burly
innkeeper at a mysterious rustic country retreat.
By day, these men daily mask their innermost desires. Yet it is
inevitable that, in the course of their nighttime duties, these men of
hair and bone will reveal the hidden secrets thumping in their hearts
and pulsing in their pants, to another man who will fulfill those
hidden fantasies.
In Night Duty, Nicolas Mann shares his erotic fiction and artwork
featuring masculine, hairy men and the other sexy guys whom they lust
after, and who love them in return—including drawings created
especially for this book.
This unique collection of bearotic fiction and art will amuse and
arouse anyone who enjoys the intimate company of masculine men.
The digital versions available here are FULLY ILLUSTRATED.
(Kindle and Smashwords.com versions are not
illustrated.)
Waking
Up Bear, and Other Stories is a sexy, fun, often
touching collection of Bear-themed short fiction by Jay Neal, with
twenty captivating stories from periodicals such as American Bear
and 100% Beef and several Lambda Literary Award-winning
anthologies, plus three previously unpublished stories.
Contents:
Blade ~ Time Out ~ A Returning Appetite ~ Cub Makes Headlines! ~ Old
Haunts ~ Confessions of a Failed Pervert ~ Physical Therapy ~ Sapphire
~ Sun, Sand, & Max ~ A Bedtime Story ~ Undercover Bears ~ The Old
Block ~ Tom Selleck’s Mustache ~ Artful Fur ~ The Lighthouse Keep ~ My
Mountain Man ~ Bears Write Bare ~ The Café Françoise ~ Waking Up Bear ~
My Best Friend, Frank
Desire.
The longing for the touch of men. The edge of hunger. The need for
supplicants craving a sweaty embrace, a passionate tryst in the dark.
Devour.
To drink, to dispatch, to swallow. To quench one's unimaginable thirst.
To leave an empty vessel behind as one walks away into the night.
More than a hundred and fifty years before Dracula ever touched English
soil, Scottish Highlander Derek Maclaine became one of the undead to
bring a terrible vengeance on those who had taken the man he loved. But
revenge could not sate his appetites for sweat and blood through the
years; an immortal learns to survive, to love again, as the lives of
mortals are bright and brief flames that attract vampires like amorous
moths.
Award-winning author Jeff Mann has collected his erotic and powerful
stories of Derek's unlife, adventures that travel centuries and the
globe. Loosen your collar, bare your throat, sigh in expectation, but
do not forget to shiver as this burly and brawny stalker of men steps
behind you, to brush his beard against your neck as his hands grasp you
where you most need to be touched.
"Whether he’s writing poetry, erotic short stories, or novels, Jeff
Mann brings a fluency to the form at hand and a dose of man-to-man
electricity generated by shifting power dynamics."
During the Civil War, two young soldiers on opposite sides find
themselves drawn together. One is a scholarly, war-weary Southerner who
has seen too much bloodshed, especially the tortures inflicted upon the
enemy by his vicious commanding officer, his uncle. The other is a
Herculean Yankee captured by the ragtag Confederate band and forced to
become a martyr for all the sins of General Sheridan’s fires. When
these two find themselves admiring more than one another’s spirit and
demeanor, when passions erupt between captor and captive, will this new
romance survive the arduous trek to Purgatory Mountain?
“Mann effectively weaves into his narrative the hunger, lice, battle
scars, and hardening of men who live through war, and the
captive/captor relationship offers nuance and complexity.”
—Publishers Weekly
“From the first page, Purgatory grabs you by the heart and won’t let
go. Scary, touching, visceral. It’s a journey through war and love you
won't easily forget.”
—Erastes, author of Mere Mortals
“The bonds of war are most vivid in Jeff Mann’s powerful Purgatory as
Reb and Yank suffer more personal skirmishes than large scale battles.
Mann’s powerful and evocative prose gives us the exhausted courage of
the Civil War’s late stages while descending into the brutality man
imposes on his fellow man. The two soldiers manage to build a tender
relationship amid the carnage, even as their ultimate engagement is
built upon a brutality at times rejected, at times embraced.”
—Dale Chase, author of The Company
He Keeps
Honorable Mention in the Gay category
of the San Francisco Book
Festival
Tales from the Den: Wild and Weird Stories
for Bears
R. Jackson, ed.
“Lions, and tigers, and bears, oh my!”
You’re not afraid of wild and weird things that go Woof in the night,
are you.
Enter the Den, where this frightfully stimulating collection of fifteen
hot and hairy stories—written by and for the masculine men who call
themselves bears, cubs, wolves, otters, and the critters who love
them—will be sure to give you a chill up your spine and a thrill
between your furry loins.
The erotomythic stories tell of bearish men who dare enter forbidden
realms populated (and copulated) by mystical beings, supernatural
creatures, fantastic spirits, netherworldly demons, and bizarre
beasts—your typical Folsom Street Fair crowd.
This collection includes new stories from authors William Holden,
Daniel M. Jaffe, Hank Edwards, ’Nathan Burgoine, Jay Starre, and Lee
Thomas, and others; classic bear tales from Jay Neal, Jeff Mann, and
Nicolas Mann; plus fabulous original short fiction by fresh talents in
the bear writing community.
Tales from the Den may or may not grow hair on your palms, but it’s
certain to raise fur on the back of your neck.
"a perfectly marvelous collection of
bear-scares" -- Review in Out in Print read
the review
Enveloped by the native spirits of the Pacific
Northwest, Roy Wallace and David Moreau’s newfound relationship begins.
David soon introduces Roy to the House of Wolves, a small intentional
community of gay and bisexual men where honor, companionship,
spirituality, erotic desire, and brotherhood guide their way. Having
lost their visionary founder, the household has been faltering and
losing faith in the dreams that brought them together. Energized by
David’s new relationship with Roy, the group takes the final steps to
grieve its past loss while striving for an extraordinary new future.
Each man living in the house embodies a totem from the spirit world,
and has committed himself to finding a unique path in life. As the
mystical rituals and traditions of Roy’s new chosen family are
revealed, each character is forced to confront fears and break through
personal limitations in order to embrace the extraordinary loving
spirit that ultimately unites them in body, mind, and spirit in the
House of Wolves.
“The House of Wolves is a
vivid amalgam of elements: body hair and beards, pipe smoke and
man-musk, the landscape of the Pacific Northwest, the richness of
Native American culture. Bob McDiarmid’s evocative novel beautifully
intertwines the erotic, the romantic, and the spiritual, and it depicts
homomasculinity at its best: lusty, strong, compassionate, and kind.”
—Jeff Mann, Lambda Literary Award-winner, A History of Barbed Wire.
Robert B. McDiarmid
is a writer and activist who lives in Palo Alto, California. The House of Wolves is his first
novel.
Winner of the
Pauline Reage Novel Award of
the National Leather Association: International
Fog: A Novel of Desire and
Reprisal
by Jeff Mann
Outside an isolated cabin, winter fog caresses
spruce trees. Inside, two men, lovers, have enacted a plan of revenge,
kidnapping the handsome son of the man who wronged one of them. Al, the
accomplice, has stalked Rob for weeks, and his infatuation for the
young man has grown deeper than he ever anticipated. So much so that he
finds himself drawn to protect Rob from the rage and vengeance burning
away his partner Jay’s insides. Caring for their bound and gagged
captive, with
each passing day Al finds his power over Rob a potent and irresistible
aphrodisiac and his heart dangerously moved. But Jay has no intention
of ever allowing the young man to escape.
“Jeff Mann’s Fog
is brutally sexy, crossing that liminal space where sensuality and
cruelty meet and mingle over and over again. A breathtaking and deeply
erotic tale of violence, lust and above all, a loving passion that
makes you ache in sympathy. Simply fantastic.”
—J.C. Herneson, author of Spring of
the Stag God
"Sex is violence and passion is pain in Mann’s
relentlessly brutal – yet irrepressibly romantic – short novel.…Both
shocking and sensual, this is an instant classic." — Richard Labonté, Book Marks
In intense, lyrical language, Jeff Mann’s short stories give us an
array of tormented characters: adulterous lovers, a kidnapper and his
handsome victim, the sadistic ghost of a Confederate soldier, a
yearning forestry student, an eager masochist, and a hairy biker. These
tales explore the sex and psychology of BDSM and of bear culture, and
most are set in Mann's native Appalachia, an area often mythologized as
a place where the wilderness within converges with the wilderness
without.
“A History of Barbed Wire
is a collection of ten short stories that crackle with subcutaneous
sexual energy and a novella that delves straight into dark obsession on
its opening pages…a satisfying combination of both brain and brawn
whose Southern drawl is so seductive that readers will find it hard to
resist and even harder to put down.”
—Christian Wright, Velvet Mafia
Fired from his job at Phag Magazine, Peter Mallory has to find a way to
make a living…and get revenge! When his best friend suggests writing a
book about the bear community—and using his new ursine look to go
undercover at Phag—Peter is soon letting his body hair grow and
practicing the fine art of flannel couture. When Peter’s sabotage
campaign works only too well, he starts to run the risk of discovery.
With an envious fellow bear set to unmask Peter as a fraud, and a
relationship with an intriguing bear on the line, things are about to
get very hairy!
“A fast-moving, hilarious story…Bear Like Me is a definite page-turner
and a quick read to boot. Moreover, Cohen’s novel, while fiction,
is never-the-less fascinating in its spot-on depiction of the world
culture of bears that make up a part of the larger gay community.”
—Jerry Flack, Independent Gay Writer
Does a bear read in the woods? You bet your sweet
woof he does!
Bear Lust presents powerful stories of raw, hairy, beefy male love by
authors Jeff Mann, Dale Chase, Daniel M. Jaffe, Simon Sheppard, Jay
Neal, R.E. Neu, Jay Starre, Karl von Uhl, Thom Wolf, Furr, and other
top homomasculine writers. Edited by R. Jackson, the sometimes amusing
but always arousing fiction in Bear Lust reveals that the clan of the
Bear cult has never been so hot!
Binding the God:
Ursine Essays from the Mountain South
by Jeff Mann
A much lauded essayist and poet, Jeff Mann writes of the passion and
pain of being a Southern gentleman who happens to be invested in many
worlds: the hungers of gay Bear culture; the propensities of
leather and bondage; the frustrations of academia; and the perspectives
of an Appalachian who has traveled the world. In Binding the God, his
second collection of essays, Mann offers readers another tour of his
consciousness and experiences. This volume includes essays
previously published in Arts and Letters, Second Person Queer,
Callaloo, Now and Then, White Crane, Queer and Catholic, and other
journals and anthologies.
Wonderful review in EDGE Atlanta: "These
essays are full of humor, anecdote, political fury, and sexual frisson.
They also contain a deep and melodic religious resonance. This burly
leather bear poet brings word and flesh together in the most
compassionate, if underserved, sense of untrammeled faith." Read
the rest of the review
With great humor and sensitivity, writer Daniel M. Jaffe’s novel The
Limits of Pleasure follows Dave Miller, a forty-year-old bearish gay
man, living in Boston in an escalating skirmish to reconcile his Jewish
and gay identities.
A year after the death of his Holocaust-surviving grandmother, Dave
leaves Boston for Amsterdam, the home of Anne Frank, whom his Grandma
revered. Dave, feeling undeserving to confront the suffering that
Grandma endured in the concentration camps, cannot bring himself to
visit Anne Frank’s house.
Angry at himself and the world, Dave repeatedly seeks out risky erotic
trysts that mix sacred ritual with profane hedonism. Then he meets
Alexander, a sexually reserved Dutchman of Indonesian heritage, who has
identity conflicts of his own. The relationship shakes both men’s lives
to their core.
Bear Bones Books editor Ron Suresha reads a story from Daniel Jaffe's
book on Bear Soup podcast.
Prepare your loins for tales of erotic adventure in the world of
Khernia, in this first release of the Stag God Chronicles. "A Stag God
is Born" - A sexual prisoner of his cruel uncle, young Ashlan befriends
the man's prisoner, Imbru once a feared warrior of the Split Hoof orc
tribe, called The Ravager of Men by by the humans, because he spent his
seed only on men. Imbru knows the truth behind Ashlan's strange dreams
of running through fields with an antlered brow. Ashlan doesn't
understand the dreams or know he is about to inherit a divine mantle he
never wanted--the legacy of the great antlered Stag God of the wild
places. "The Stag & The Bear" - The young god suffering the pains
of new divinity goes seeking a mentor, the great Bear God of the stormy
mountain tops. Along the way, an orc hunter is forced to his knees to
become Ashlan's new discipline. But approaching an old god is
treacherous and his were-bear minions must be confronted and defeated
before the Bear God's den is reached. "The Stag God's Disciple" - Habra
of the Tines, a young orc, goes among humans to preach the worship of
Ashlan. But the Patriachs of the human lands do not want to relinquish
their power and bind, rape and imprison Habra. But in the dungeons new
friends are waiting to be found as the faith in the Lord of the Seven
Tines spreads like passion through a man's nethers.
This
first volume in the Hot and Hairy series of outstanding erotic short
fiction draws readers deep into the thickest forest of masculine desire
to reveal at a hidden bonfire a long-hidden clan of gay, bi, and queer
men from the Bear cult.
In Bearotica, you’ll meet: a
mountain man who guides a young fellow through his initiation into male
love as they cross over the American frontier; a couple of wayward
bikers riding together down a dusty, lusty road; four massive
musclebears using junkyard metal and their other tools to improvise
weightlifting routines; two warriors, one a bear and one wolf, battle
in an 8th-Century Norwegian lodge for sexual dominance; and many more
unforgettable characters.
Edited by R. Jackson, Bearotica
presents seventeen strong, arousing, compelling stories of
homomasculine love by famed and favorite contributors such as Dale
Chase, Daniel M. Jaffe, Jay Neal, R.E. Neu, Jay Starre, Karl von Uhl,
and Thom Wolf, as well as new voices.
If you go out to the woods today, beware: reading these sometimes
humorous, often insightful, but always sensual tales of macho men
expressing their desires may grow fur on the palms of your paws — or at
least, show you exactly what bears really do in the woods.
Does
a Bear read in the woods? You bet your sweet woof he does! Bears in the
Wild, the third Bearotica collection of hot and hairy short fiction,
draws readers deeper into the lush forest of masculine desire. These
tales reveal at a mysterious bonfire a whole new tribe of lusty gay,
bi, and queer male characters from the Bear cult, joyously playing and
participating in their naked, natural rituals. Editor R. Jackson
presents sixteen fresh, arousing, compelling stories of homomasculine
love by famed and favorite contributors such as Simon Sheppard, Jeff
Mann, Dale Chase, Jay Neal, and Jay Starre, as well as new voices.
Reading these sometimes humorous, often insightful, but always sensual
tales of burly, macho men sharing their fierce and furry love may grow
hair on the palms of your paws or at least, show you what bears really
do in the woods.
Bears on Bears:
Interviews & Discussions (Revised edition) By Ron Suresha
Revealing, challenging, often humorous, Bears on Bears: Interviews
& Discussions examines the homomasculine subculture called Bears.
In 30 wide-ranging interviews, these 62 gay and bisexual men expose
their furrier side. They reveal their experiences as gay, bi, and trans
Bears and Bear-lovers who find their physical image and personal
lifestyle at odds with stereotypically ephebic, effeminate,
fashion-obsessed gay male culture. Finding intimate affirmation within
the increasingly international Bear brotherhood, they discuss
coming-out as Bears and the early history of Bear subculture.
Contributors include comedian Bruce Vilanch, “Survivor” Richard Hatch,
model Jack Radcliffe, and authors David Bergman, Michael Bronski, Jack
Fritscher, Wayne Hoffman, Arnie Kantrowitz, Richard Labonté, Dr.
Lawrence Mass, Eric Rofes, Mark Thompson, and Les K. Wright.
Acclaimed by Andrew Sullivan on Salon.com as “the invaluable book” on
Bears, the revised edition of Bears on Bears features fresh interviews
with filmmakers Kevin Bowe and Dan Hunt, radio personality Larry Flick,
author Jonathan Cohen, and Metropolitan Community Church founder Rev.
Troy Perry.
Bears on Bears confronts conventional images of male beauty and
contemporary concepts of masculinity in a moving and colorful portrait
of a men’s community that makes for fascinating reading on many levels.
Edge:
Travels of an Appalachian Leather Bear
By Jeff Mann
The autobiographical essays in Edge offer insight into the passions of
acclaimed author Jeff Mann. These memories, insightful as they are
endearing, range from his boyhood obsession with the gothic allure of
Dark Shadows, to the doubt and pain of being a Southerner and so at the
edge of the gay community, and the appeal of leather bars and bear
culture.
Mann also visits many gay meccas in several of these essays—the resorts
of Key West, Provincetown, and Rehoboth Beach, along with several
European destinations such as Germany, Ireland, Belgium, and Scotland,
have important cameos. But he is never an idle traveler—he is
challenged by his experiences, and his observations reveal the thoughts
of many gay men. Along the way Mann ruminates on a variety of subjects,
from lost lovers to kilts, theophany, Sylvia Plath, adult videos, and
bathhouses.
