David Leavitt

It is the Saturday after the 2016 presidential election, and in a plush weekend house in Connecticut, an intimate group of friends, New Yorkers all, has gathered to recover from what they consider the greatest political catastrophe of their lives. They have just sat down to tea when their hostess, Eva Lindquist, proposes a dare. Who among them would be willing to ask Siri how to assassinate Donald Trump? Liberal and like-minded-editors, writers, a...

A "skillful, literate" (New York Times Book Review) biography of the persecuted genius who helped create the modern computer.To solve one of the great mathematical problems of his day, Alan Turing proposed an imaginary computer. Then, attempting to break a Nazi code during World War II, he successfully designed and built one, thus ensuring the Allied victory. Turing became a champion of artificial intelligence, but his work was cut short. As an openly...

Three novellas featuring homosexual relationships. In The Term Paper Artist, a poet at a California college acquires lovers among straight men by writing papers for them, in The Wooden Anniversary a woman in love with a gay man finds he prefers her male cook, while Saturn Street is on the lot of victims of aids in Los Angeles.

"In these nine stories, David Leavitt surveys the complicated politics of human relationships in families and communities, in the present day and over the course of the last century." "Here are stories that range in form from a historical survey to a police interrogation to an e-mail exchange. In 'The Infection Scene,' a young man's determined effort to contract HIV is juxtaposed with an account of the early life of Lord Alfred Douglas. In the title...

Collects short stories written by Edward Morgan Forster, including "The Celestial Omnibus," "The Machine Stops," and "The Story of the Siren."