This image is the cover for the book Arkansas

Arkansas

Three “sly, self-knowing, and hilarious” novellas from the highly acclaimed author of The Lost Language of Cranes (The New York Times).

Here are three novellas of escape and exile, touching and funny and at times calculatedly outrageous. In “Saturn Street,” a disaffected LA 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.

“Confessional, audacious and outrageous . . . This is classic Leavitt—writing with subtlety, maturity and compassion about the complexity and fragility of human relationships.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

David Leavitt

David Leavitt’s first collection of stories, Family Dancing, a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner Prize, was published when he was just twenty-three. The Lost Language of Cranes was made into a BBC film, and While England Sleeps was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize. With Mark Mitchell, he coedited The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories and Pages Passed from Hand to Hand, and cowrote Italian Pleasures. Leavitt is a recipient of fellowships from both the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He divides his time between Italy and Florida.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (www.hmhco.com)