Books like Michael Tolliver lives by Armistead Maupin

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay follows 19‑year‑old Josef Kavalier, a Prague refugee who arrives in 1939 New York and partners with his cousin Sammy to create a comic‑book hero, the Escapist, while fighting fascism, navigating family, identity and the rapidly changing world of 20th‑century mass media.

Augusten Burroughs recounts his turbulent adolescence spent in a decaying Victorian home run by a psychiatrist, where ordinary rites of childhood give way to a surreal blend of family eccentricity, escape from school, and the early years of a future author.

Arjie, the second son of a privileged Sri Lankan family, struggles to reconcile his playful love of staging wedding pageants with the rigid expectations of adulthood, while confronting his emerging sexuality amid a nation torn by Tamil‑Sinhalese conflict.

Patricia Highsmith’s final novel, "Small g," opens with a shocking murder in a Zurich bar and navigates the tangled strands of love, sexuality, jealousy, and death against a Swiss backdrop.

Seventy‑four‑year‑old Barrington Jedidiah Walker, an Antiguan expatriate in London’s Hackney, balances family life with a hidden gay identity, risking his marriage and long‑hidden truth for authenticity and freedom.

In a Mumbai hollowed by looming nuclear threat, Sarita rambles the empty streets to purchase the last pomegranate, hoping its mystery will reunite her with her missing physicist husband.

Old Rosa is a Cuban short‑story collection that follows a mother and her son as their lives intersect in the midst of a repressive regime, exploring the hardships faced by gay men under Castro’s rule.

A compromised young teacher travels to Paris under a false identity to investigate the life of Allan Stein, the troubled nephew of Gertrude Stein, while confronting his own hidden desires and past.

A lively collection of interwoven stories set in a San Francisco household, spotlighting the city’s vibrant LGBTQ+ community and urban life.

Maybe the Moon, Armistead Maupin's first novel since ending his bestselling Tales of the City series, is the audaciously original chronicle of Cadence Roth -- Hollywood actress, singer, iconoclast and former Guiness Book record holder as the world's shortest woman. All of 31 inches tall, Cady is a true survivor in a town where -- as she says -- "you can die of encouragement." Her early starring role as a lovable elf in an immensely popular American film proved a major disappointment, since moviegoers never saw the face behind the stifling rubber suit she was required to wear. Now, after a decade of hollow promises from the Industry, she is reduced to performing at birthday parties and bat mitzvahs as she waits for the miracle that will finally make her a star. In a series of mordantly funny journal entries, Maupin tracks his spunky heroine across the saffron-hazed wasteland of Los Angeles -- from her all-too-infrequent meetings with agents and studio moguls to her regular harrowing encounters with small children, large dogs and human ignorance. Then one day a lanky piano player saunters into Cady's life, unleashing heady new emotions, and she finds herself going for broke, shooting the moon with a scheme so harebrained and daring that it just might succeed. Her accomplice in the venture is her best friend, Jeff, a gay waiter who sees Cady's struggle for visibility as a natural extension of his own war against the Hollywood Closet. As clear-eyed as it is charming, Maybe the Moon is a modern parable about the mythology of the movies and the toll it exacts from it participants on both sides of the screen. It is a work that speaks to the resilience of the human spirit from a perspective rarely found in literature.

In "Sure of You," a driven TV talk-show host faces a crossroads between New York fame and an intimate life in San Francisco, while her gay friend wrestles with his own uncertain future.

The final volume in Mordden's trilogy on gay life in the big city.