Carter Sickels

Alan Hart, a physician, radiologist, tuberculosis researcher, and best-selling novelist, was also one of the first transgender men to undergo a hysterectomy in the United States. Hart lived and worked for many years in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho before moving to Hartford, Connecticut, where he died in 1962.In 1936, Hart published The Undaunted, his second best-seller. The novel, which follows young doctor Richard Cameron's attempts to find an effective treatment for anemia, begins in the west coast city of Seaforth, a stand-in for 1920s Seattle. Within the medical-research plot, Hart also weaves the story of men-Cameron and radiologist Sandy Farquhar-whose personalities and bodies do not fit neatly within the norms of the social or medical establishment. Dedicated to medicine and the understanding that scientific knowledge can decrease human pain and suffering, these men must nevertheless pursue their careers at personal cost. Lauded in its time for its insights into the inner workings of the medical field, The Undaunted is also an important document of the struggle of the human heart.

One of 2020's most acclaimed books. Winner of the Southern Book Prize - Winner of the Weatherford Award - A Kirkus Best Fiction Book of 2020 - One of O Magazine's Best LGBT Books of 2020 - - One of the Women's National Book Association's 2020 Great Group Reads Selections - EW's 50 Most Anticipated Books of 2020 - BookRiot - Lambda Literary's - Salon - BookPage's - Garden & Gun's - Logo NewNowNext's In this "brutally fresh kind of homecoming novel," (Entertainment Weekly) Brian Jackson returns to his small Appalachian hometown and the family who rejected him. Carter Sickels's stunning literary achievement "deserves a place in the canon of AIDS literature alongside the likes of Larry Kramer and Rebecca Makkai" (Los Angeles Review of Books). The story of Brian's return to small-town Ohio is told in a chorus of voices: Brian's mother Sharon; his fourteen-year-old sister, Jess, as she grapples with her brother's mysterious return; and the video diaries Brian makes to document his final summer. Written in prose that seeks "to answer without flinching away from ugliness and without demonizing the ignorant" (Salon), The Prettiest Star offers an urgent portrait of a family in the center of a national crisis, in order to tell a unique story about the politics and fragility of the body, and to explore the bounds of family and redemption.

Most of the wealth in Dove Creek, West Virginia, is in the earth-in the coal seams that have provided generations with a way of life. Born and raised here, twenty-seven-year-old Cole Freeman has sidestepped work as a miner to become an aide in a nursing home. He's got a shock of bleached blond hair and a gentle touch well suited to the job. He's also a drug dealer, reselling the prescription drugs his older patients give him to a younger crowd looking for different kinds of escape. In this economically depressed, shifting landscape, Cole is floundering. The mining corporation is angling to buy the Freeman family's property, and Cole's protests only feel like stalling. Although he has often dreamed of leaving, he has a sense of duty to this land, especially after the death of his grandfather. His grandfather is not the only loss: Cole's one close friend, Terry Rose, has also slipped away from him, first to marriage, then to drugs. While Cole alternately attempts romance with two troubled women, he spends most of his time with the elderly patients at the home, desperately trying to ignore the decay of everything and everyone around him. Only when a disaster befalls these mountains is Cole forced to confront his fears and, finally, take decisive action-if not to save his world, to at least save himself. The Evening Hour marks the powerful debut of a writer who brings originality, nuance, and an incredible talent for character to an iconic American landscape in the throes of change.