Arkansas by Leavitt

Arkansas by Leavitt

Here are three novellas of escape and exile, touching and funny and at times calculatedly outrageous. In Saturn Street, a disaffected L.A. screenwriter delivers lunches to homebound AIDS patients, only to find himself falling in love with one of them. In The Wooden Anniversary, Nathan and Celia - familiar characters from Leavitt's story collections - reunite after a five-year separation. And in The Term-Paper Artist, a writer named David Leavitt, hiding out at his father's house in the aftermath of a publishing scandal, experiences literary rejuvenation when he agrees to write term papers for UCLA undergraduates in exchange for sex.

Here are three novellas of escape and exile, touching and funny and at times calculatedly outrageous. In Saturn Street, a disaffected L.A. screenwriter delivers lunches to homebound AIDS patients, only to find himself falling in love with one of them. In The Wooden Anniversary, Nathan and Celia - familiar characters from Leavitt's story collections - reunite after a five-year separation. And in The Term-Paper Artist, a writer named David Leavitt, hiding out at his father's house in the aftermath of a publishing scandal, experiences literary rejuvenation when he agrees to write term papers for UCLA undergraduates in exchange for sex.

Here are three novellas of escape and exile, touching and funny and at times calculatedly outrageous. In Saturn Street, a disaffected L.A. screenwriter delivers lunches to homebound AIDS patients, only to find himself falling in love with one of them. In The Wooden Anniversary, Nathan and Celia - familiar characters from Leavitt's story collections - reunite after a five-year separation. And in The Term-Paper Artist, a writer named David Leavitt, hiding out at his father's house in the aftermath of a publishing scandal, experiences literary rejuvenation when he agrees to write term papers for UCLA undergraduates in exchange for sex.

David Leavitt's fiction has been shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Award and has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the LA Times Fiction Prize. His work has appeared in journals such as the New Yorker, the New York Times, Harper's, and Vogue, among others. He is a professor of English at the University of Florida and the editor of the literary magazine Subtropics. He lives in Gainesville, Florida.