Douglas A. Martin

Begun as a response to a front page photograph illustrating a tragedy that the media quickly sensationalized in the early 2000’s, Wolf tells the composite truth of two brothers, a family friend, a father, and a murder. Skeptical of news cycles and the way trials become page-turners, this book forgoes the standards of true crime: quick conclusions and moralistic underpinnings. Instead, motivated by an attempt to extend empathy, its reconstruction unfolds in tones of witness and meditation. What results is a story about the extremities to which deeply unchecked abuse and ongoing trauma can push a family.

The twentieth anniversary edition of an early autofiction classic.On the fringes of the music scene in a Southern college town, a lonely young student driven to flee a troubled adolescence pursues and forms a life-altering relationship with an acclaimed artist-musician. Their understanding develops in a pattern of sex and reticence, soon impacting both their paths and greatly shifting expectations. Written “as if telling the truth was a matter of survival” (Andrew O’Hagan), it is a queer bildungsroman.

For readers of Michael Cunningham's The Hours and Madeline Miller's Song of Achilles, this genre-bending exploration of the tragic figure of Branwell Bronte and the dismal, dazzling landscape that inspired his sisters to greatness is now available in a new edition with an introduction by Darcey Steinke.Branwell Bronte-brother of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne-has a childhood marked by tragedy and the weight of expectations. After the early deaths of his mother and a beloved older sister, he is kept away from school and tutored at home by his father, a curate, who rests all his ambitions for his children on his only son. Branwell grows up isolated in his family's parsonage on the moors, learning Latin and Greek, being trained in painting, and collaborating on endless stories and poems with his sisters.Yet while his sisters go on to write Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and Agnes Grey, Branwell wanders from job to job, growing increasingly dependent on alcohol and opium and failing to become a great poet or artist.With rich, suggestive sentences "perfectly fitted to this famously imaginative, headstrong family" (Publishers Weekly), Branwell is a portrait of childhood dreams, thwarted desire, the confinements of gender-and an homage to the landscape and milieu that inspired some of the most revolutionary works of English literature.

A lyric cover of Kathy Acker’s career and a study of the development of narrative in her books deftly tracing Acker’s interactions with a diverse palette of avant-gardisms, world letters, cultures, and theory. Martin follows Acker through New York’s downtown St. Mark’s Poetry Project scene, Black Mountain College, and the Beats, as Acker embarks on her own deconstructions of subjects autobiographical and historical, art procedurals, proto-conceptual writing, legacies, and spirits.

In 2000, Douglas A. Martin burst onto the American literary scene with his sexy debut novel, Outline of My Lover. Following up with three more books, including Branwell, a novel of the Bront brother, Martin has established himself as an acclaimed and distinctive American writer of the new century. His semi-autobiographical novel Once You Go Back is about growing up in a strained working-class household transplanted to the South. In his inimitably elliptical and evocative style, Martin carefully brings out the curiosity of children on the verge of becoming sexual, and their confusion in the midst of family violence.

In Your Body Figured, Douglas A. Martin presents the reader with three prose pieces, each focused on an artist: the painter Balthus, the poet Hart Crane, and finally the Irish painter Francis Bacon as seen through his relationship with model and muse, George Dyer

This book lets passionate encounters unfold like bits of film. Treacherously comic and poignant, the stories in ""They Change the Subject"" follow a young man's quest for identity through love and desire. Sustained by a single voice, the stories simultaneously offer a fractured novel and stand, powerfully, on their own. At the center of each tale is the heightened, visceral possibility of unexpected emotional encounters - from an escort's dates in Manhattan hotels to a photo shoot that doubles as seduction. Always pushing toward a bigger shiver of passion, Martin's young-man-on-the-make learns how to adapt his persona to suit his lovers' needs and tries to embrace his own experience - and his self - by becoming the purest object of desire.