The Book of Lies Hardcover - 1999

From the publisher

Bright, ambitious, and handsome, Ross Ohrenstedt is a high flier in the fashionable field of queer studies. He has just taken a prestigious university position in Los Angeles and has been appointed to oversee the collection of papers and works of a leading light of the gay literary salon known as the Purple Circle. Ross stumbles across a "lost" work by an unknown author and his quest to identify the mystery writer and achieve the glory of scholastic tenure unveils increasingly bizarre and unbalanced facts about a group of writers who in the 1970s and 1980s broke new ground in the creation of a gay literary sensibility. But the dark truth contained within "The Book of Lies" is even more startling. With biting wit and a lush sense of place and character, Felice Picano's daring novel is at once a stylish mystery, a comical roman clef, and a wicked send-up of the new Ivory Tower.
"Leave it to Felice Picano to add a walloping dose of melodrama and intrigue to a tale already redrawing genre boundaries...What Picano does is take an academic mystery (subject matter that might have proved tedious or solipsistic in lesser hands) and morphs it into something new--a page-turning, often campy, occasionally serious critique of academia and historical truth, literary celebrity, and the imminent future of America."-"Philadelphia Tribune" Felice Picano is the author of 19 books including the best-selling novels "Like People In History, Looking Glass Lives, The Lure" and "Eyes" as well as the literary memoirs "Ambidextrous, Men Who Loved Me," and "A House On the Ocean, A House On the Bay." He is also the author with Dr. Charles Silverstein of "The New Joy of Gay Sex." A native of New York, Felice Picano now lives in Los Angeles.