Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends - Silas Weir Mitchell
Blair Mastbaum is a contradiction in terms, former model, sometime actor, he should be always on center stage, his photos plastered everywhere, and instead he is more the reclusive type. Oh, his face is plenty on the net, if you want to find it, but if you visit his website (
http://blairmastbaum.tumblr.com/), the bio simply says "Mr. Blair Mikhail MASTBAUM, writer, linguist", the booklist is Clay's Way, Us Ones In Between, Cool Thing, Clay's Return (in progress), Homme Boys (in progress), a contact email, and then you go directly to his blog. Blair Mastbaum seems to be more generous with his words, his thoughts, and in the end, his soul; the "about the author" section for him is represented by his brainstorming, sometime a short story, more often a picture, little pieces of his mind. Like his list, he said to me "I know my descriptions are brief, but they still manage to capture why I love these books"; yes, they plenty manage to do that, and I'm sure that many in my friends list will love this.
1) Try – Dennis Cooper. Sweetness under the guise of horror. In the opening scene, a teenage kid called Ziggy is sitting in his bed editing his zine about being abused. A kid gets killed by an evil pornographer. Yet you’re rooting for these people, you feel their heartache and lonliness. Paperback: 208 pages
Publisher: Grove Press (March 9, 1995)
Publisher Link:
http://www.groveatlantic.com/#page=isbn9780802133380%20ISBN-10: 080213338X
ISBN-13: 978-0802133380
Amazon:
Try Simultaneously deadpan and queasily raw, Try is the story of Ziggy, the adopted teenaged son of two sexually abusive fathers whose failed experiment at nuclear-family domesticity has left him stranded with one and increasingly present in the fantasies of the other. He turns from both of these men to his uncle, who sells pornographic videos on the black market, and to his best friend, a junkie whose own vulnerability inspires in Ziggy a fierce and awkward devotion. Terminally insecure and yet inured to sexual brutality, Ziggy questions his two fathers, his uncle, his drug dealer, his friends, and himself in an attempt to isolate and define the vagaries and boundaries of sexuality, attraction, and abuse, compiling their responses into a magazine that he calls I Apologize. In prose that is taut, rhythmic, charged, chillingly precise, and beautifully controlled, Cooper examines his characters’ motivations not as the product of cultural coercion but as the emanations of something hungry and amoral and essentially human. Try explores “that buried need to go all the way and really possess someone,” that place where desire disintegrates into the irrational. He illuminates with utter clarity the need to claim the desirable, to possess wholly something that will fulfill the profound emptiness of the human soul. With Try, Cooper has produced a novel even more complex than his previous books, dangerously innovative and with the startling familiarity of truth in its examination of love, obsession, devotion, and the depths of human need.
2) Less Than Zero – Bret Easton Ellis. Set the framework for a new gay identity, a new fantastic way of living, and made every young gay kid I knew fantasize about being an object. Paperback: 208 pages
Publisher: Vintage (June 30, 1998)
Publisher Link:
http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780679781493ISBN-10: 0679781498
ISBN-13: 978-0679781493
Amazon:
Less Than Zero Set in Los Angeles in the early 1980's, this coolly mesmerizing novel is a raw, powerful portrait of a lost generation who have experienced sex, drugs, and disaffection at too early an age, in a world shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money a place devoid of feeling or hope. Clay comes home for Christmas vacation from his Eastern college and re-enters a landscape of limitless privilege and absolute moral entropy, where everyone drives Porches, dines at Spago, and snorts mountains of cocaine. He tries to renew feelings for his girlfriend, Blair, and for his best friend from high school, Julian, who is careering into hustling and heroin. Clay's holiday turns into a dizzying spiral of desperation that takes him through the relentless parties in glitzy mansions, seedy bars, and underground rock clubs and also into the seamy world of L.A. after dark.
( books from 3 to 10 ) About Blair Mastbaum: Blair Mastbaum is American writer and a former model who lives in Portland, Oregon. Mastbaum acted in and produced the 2005 Sundance Film Festival official competition film, Ellie Parker, directed by Scott Coffey. Mastbaum's first novel, 2004's Clay's Way, won a Lambda Literary Award. Mastbaum's second novel, Us Ones In Between, published by Running Press and released in May 2008, centers on depressed art school graduate Kurt Smith, who fantasizes about pushing boys in front of subway trains. The title is taken from the song "Us Ones In Between," written by Spencer Krug and performed by the band Sunset Rubdown. The novel was a finalist for the 2008 Ferro-Grumley Award. Mastbaum edited the anthology Cool Thing: The Best New Gay Fiction by Young American Writers, released by Running Press on November 10, 2008.
Best Gay Erotica 2010 edited by Richard Labonté, selected and introduced by Blair Mastbaum
Paperback: 224 pages
Publisher: Cleis Press (December 1, 2009)
Publisher Link:
http://www.cleispress.com/book_page.php?book_id=346ISBN-10: 1573443743
ISBN-13: 978-1573443746
Amazon:
Best Gay Erotica 2010 Heart pounding, male-on-male desire.
When sexual intensity and literary flair meet, the result is Best Gay Erotica 2010. Series editor Richard Labonté gathers the most intelligent, provocative gay erotic fiction of each year. This year's edition, selected and introduced by guest judge Blair Mastbaum, features the private and public lusts of gay men in a collection of unparalleled hotness. In "A Beautiful Face," a male ingénue brings Hollywood to its knees, literally. "The Suburban Boy" reveals the real magic kingdom in central Florida, where every erotic with comes true.
Including: Hank Fenwick, Natty Soltesz, David May, Richard Hennebert, Simon Sheppard, Jimmy Hamada, Robert Patrick, Shane Allison, Tommy Lee "Doc" Boggs, Rachel Kramer Bussel, Thom Wolf, Trebor Healey, David Holly, Jamie Freeman, Jeff Mann, Jonathan Kemp, Rob Wolfsham, and Jan Vander Laenen.
To celebrate the release of Blood Fruit, the new LGBT horror anthology by QueerEdFiction, editor James EM Rasmussen is giving away a free ebook of the anthology. If you want to have a chance to win it, just leave a comment (and a contact email if it's not on your LJ account; anonymous comments are welcomed,just remember to leave a contact email) on this post. If you don't win it, then buy it! ;-) 
To celebrate the release of Blood Fruit, the new LGBT horror anthology by QueerEdFiction, editor James EM Rasmussen is giving away a free ebook of the anthology. If you want to have a chance to win it, just leave a comment (and a contact email if it's not on your LJ account; anonymous comments are welcomed,just remember to leave a contact email) on this post. If you don't win it, then buy it! ;-) 
The strong point of the BDSM novels by Jaime Craig (the authors duo Pepper Espinoza and Vivien Dean) is the ability, at least for me, to make me comfortable with all the 24/7 Master/slave relationship. 
The strong point of the BDSM novels by Jaime Craig (the authors duo Pepper Espinoza and Vivien Dean) is the ability, at least for me, to make me comfortable with all the 24/7 Master/slave relationship.