Dale Peck Book order

The first collection of short fiction from Lambda Award–winning novelist Dale Peck spans twenty-five years of writing, including two O. Henry award-winners and the recipient of a Pushcart Prize. The stories in What Burns examine the extremes of desire against a backdrop of family, class, and mortality. In “Bliss,” a young man befriends the convicted felon who murdered his mother when he was only a child. In “Not Even Camping Is Like Camping Anymore,” a teenage boy fends off the advances of a five-year-old his mother babysits. And in “Dues,” a man discovers that everything he owns is borrowed from someone else—including his time on earth. Walking the tightrope between tenderness and violence that has defined Peck’s work since the publication of his first novel, Martin and John, through his most recent, Night Soil, What Burns reveals Peck’s mastery of the short form.

"You'd think it has been done before but it really hasn't—the perfectly crafted, haunting and heartbreaking, raw, funny, unblinking yet merciful art novel."—Marlon James Family secrets, sexual explorations, art world wealth, and legacies of racism and environmental destruction collide in the new novel from Lambda Award-winning author Dale Peck. A century and a half of family secrets are written on Judas Stammers’s body, painted purple by a birthmark that covers half his face and abdomen. Judas is the last descendent of a 19th-century robber baron who made his fortune off the slaves who died in his coal mines. The money’s gone, but the legacy lives on in the form of an all-male, all-black private school founded by the family patriarch in atonement for his sins. Ostracized for his name as much as his appearance, Judas’s lust for his classmates is matched only by their contempt for him, until finally he’s driven to seek out sex in places where his identity means nothing to the anonymous men he gives himself to. Hovering over everything is Judas’s mother, Dixie, an acclaimed potter whose obsession with creating the perfect vessel over and over again leaves her son that much more isolated. By turns philosophical and perverse, Night Soil is a tour de force by the writer whom Alexander Chee called “the only genius I know who could write it and live.”

Focusing on a pivotal era in the AIDS epidemic, this work blends memoir and extended essay to explore the transformative years from 1987 to 1996. It delves into the activism of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and the significant shift brought about by combination therapy, which redefined AIDS from a fatal diagnosis to a manageable condition. Peck's insights offer a personal and critical examination of the societal and medical changes during this crucial time.

Colin and Justin escape New York City after a personal tragedy linked to AIDS, finding themselves in Galatia, Kansas, a town with a complex racial history rooted in post-Civil War America. Here, they confront not only their own troubled past but also the town's deep-seated divisions between African American descendants of the founders and encroaching Caucasian settlers. Their new life quickly spirals into a harrowing crime, revealing that they cannot escape the weight of history. This novel weaves a rich tapestry of themes, exploring identity, community, and the inescapability of the past.

At the heart of the story is James Ramsay, a young man grappling with the inheritance of a brownstone in New York City after his mother's death. Living alongside Nellydean, the building's long-time tenant, he faces a moral dilemma: sell the property for quick cash or keep it and risk financial ruin. Complications arise with the arrival of Nellydean's niece, seeking refuge, and an older man's unexpected affection for James, all while he deals with his declining health. The narrative explores themes of connection, responsibility, and the complexities of family ties.

Set against a backdrop of poverty and family turmoil, the story follows Dale Peck Sr.'s challenging childhood in suburban Long Island. Abandoned by his alcoholic father and subjected to an abusive home, Dale finds refuge at his uncle's dairy farm in upstate New York. There, he experiences genuine love and support from Uncle Wallace and Aunt Bess. However, despite this newfound stability, he struggles to escape the shadows of his tumultuous past, highlighting the enduring impact of trauma and the search for belonging.

When Sprout and his father move from Long Island to Kansas after the death of his mother, he is sure he will find no friends, no love, no beauty. But friends find him, the strangeness of the landscape fascinates him, and when love shows up in an unexpected place, it proves impossible to hold. An incredible, literary story of a boy who knows he's gay, and the town that seems to have no place for him to hide.

Exploring the complexities of a decades-long marriage, the narrative follows Beatrice and Henry from their initial bond during Henry's battle with a brain tumor to their enduring relationship filled with love and conflict. Set against the backdrop of Long Island and the Finger Lakes, the story is interwoven with a poignant memoir about the author’s own family experiences, featuring his father, mother, and stepmothers. This dual narrative creates a powerful examination of how family shapes our lives, both positively and negatively.

Dale Peck’s debut is a tour de force in which Martin and John find each other again and again: in a trailer park, a high-end jewelry store, a Kansas barn, and later, in New York City, living under the shadow of the AIDS epidemic. Though their names remain the same, their identities are constantly shifting, creating a fractured view of loss and desire in the early years of the AIDS crisis. Vaulting through self and history, Martin and John is one of the most remarkable novels to emerge from an America ravaged by disease, and one of the finest and most complex love stories of the ’90s. Martin and John is the first volume of Gospel Harmonies, a series of seven stand-alone books (four have been written) which follow the character of John as he attempts to navigate the uneasy relationship between the self and the postmodern world.

A new caliber of thriller set at the collision of ’60s counterculture and the rise of dark forces in world government. Heroes creator Tim Kring injects history with a supernatural, hallucinogenic what-if.   Set in the crucible of the 1960s, Shift is the story of Chandler Forrestal, a man whose life is changed forever when he is unwittingly dragged into a CIA mind-control experiment. After being given a massive dose of LSD, Chandler de­velops a frightening array of mental powers. With his one-in-a-billion brain chemistry, Chandler’s heightened perception uncovers a plot to assassi­nate President Kennedy.   Propelled to prevent the conspiracy of assassi­nation and anarchy, Chandler becomes a target for deadly forces in and out of the government and is pursued across a simmering landscape peopled by rogue CIA agents, Cuban killers, Mafia madmen, and ex-Nazi scientists…all the while haunted by a beautiful woman with her own scandalous past to purge, her own score to settle. Chased across America, will Chandler be able to harness his “shift” and rewrite history?   Combining the nonstop style of Ludlum with the sinister, tangled conspiracies of DeLillo and Dick, and featuring cameos from Lee Harvey Oswald to Timothy Leary to J. Edgar Hoover, Shift is a thriller guaranteed to be equal parts heart-stopping and thought-provoking.