Books about Provincetown from Amazon.com

Toby Maytree first sees Lou Bigelow on her bicycle in postwar Provincetown, Massachusetts Her laughter and loveliness catch his breath. Maytree is a Provincetown native, an educated poet of thirty. As he courts Lou, just out of college, her stillness draws him. Hands-off, he hides his serious wooing, and idly shows her his poems.

In spare, elegant prose, Dillard traces the Maytrees' decades of loving and longing. They live cheaply among the nonconformist artists and writers that the bare tip of Cape Cod attracts. Lou takes up painting. When their son Petie appears, their innocent Bohemian friend Deary helps care for him. But years later it is Deary who causes the town to talk.

In this moving novel, Dillard intimately depicts nature's vastness and nearness. She presents willed bonds of loyalty, friendship, and abiding love. Warm and hopeful, The Maytrees is the surprising capstone of Annie Dillard's original body of work.

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Price: $6.11 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The year is 1989 and Mark Doty's life has reached a state of enviable equilibrium. His reputation as a poet of formidable talent is growing, he enjoys his work as a college professor and, perhaps most importantly, he is deeply in love with his partner of many years, Wally Roberts. The harmonious existence these two men share is shattered, however, when they learn that Wally has tested positive for the HIV virus.

From diagnosis to the initial signs of deterioration to the heartbreaking hour when Wally is released from his body's ruined vessel, Heaven's Coastis an intimate chronicle of love, its hardships, and its innumerable gifts. We witness Doty's passage through the deepest phase of grief -- letting his lover go while keeping him firmly alive in memory and heart -- and, eventually beyond, to the slow reawakening of the possibilities of pleasure. Part memoir, part journal, part elegy for a life of rare communication and beauty, Heaven's Coast evinces the same stunning honesty, resplendent descriptive power and rapt attention to the physical landscape that has won Doty's poetry such attention and acclaim..
Price: $2.45 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In this celebration of one of America’s oldest towns (incorporated in 1720), Michael Cunningham, author of the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize–winning The Hours, brings us Provincetown, one of the most idiosyncratic and extraordinary towns in the United States, perched on the sandy tip at the end of Cape Cod.

Provincetown, eccentric, physically remote, and heartbreakingly beautiful, has been amenable and intriguing to outsiders for as long as it has existed. “It is the only small town I know of where those who live unconventionally seem to outnumber those who live within the prescribed bounds of home and licensed marriage, respectable job, and biological children,” says Cunningham. “It is one of the places in the world you can disappear into. It is the Morocco of North America, the New Orleans of the north.”

He first came to the place more than twenty years ago, falling in love with the haunted beauty of its seascape and the rambunctious charm of its denizens. Although Provincetown is primarily known as a summer mecca of stunning beaches, quirky shops, and wild nightlife, as well as a popular destination for gay men and lesbians, it is also a place of deep and enduring history, artistic and otherwise. Few towns have attracted such an impressive array of artists and writers—from Tennessee Williams to Eugene O’Neill, Mark Rothko to Robert Motherwell—who, like Cunningham, were attracted to this finger of land because it was . . . different, nonjudgmental, the perfect place to escape to; to be rescued, healed, reborn, or simply to live
in peace. As we follow Cunningham on his various excursions through Provincetown and its surrounding landscape, we are drawn into its history, its mysteries, its peculiarities—places you won’t read about in any conventional travel guide..
Price: $4.49 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Tennesse Williams in Provincetown is the story of Tennesse Williams' four summer seasons in Provincetown, Massachusetts: 1940, '41, '44 and '47. During that time he wrote plays, short stories, and jewel-like poems. In Provincetown Williams fell in love unguardedly for perhaps the only time in his life. He had his heart broken there, perhaps irraparably. The man he thought might replace his first lover tried to kill him there, or at least Williams thought so. Williams drank in Provincetown, he swam there, and he took conga lessons there. He was poor and then rich there; he was photographed naked and clothed there. He was unknown and then famous--and throughout it all Williams wrote every morning. The list of plays Williams worked on in Provincetown include The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, the beginnings of The Night of the Iguana and Suddenly Last Summer, and an abandoned autobiographical play set in Provincetown, The Parade. Tennessee Williams in Provincetown collects original interviews, journals, letters, photographs, accounts from previous biographies, newspapers from the period, and Williams' own writing to establish how the time Williams spent in Provincetown shaped him for the rest of his life. The book identifies major themes in Williams' work that derive from his experience in Provincetown, in particular the necessity of recollection given the short season of love. The book also connects Williams mature theatrical experiments to his early friendships with Jackson Pollack, Lee Krasner and the German performance artist Valeska Gert. Tennessee Williams in Provincetown, based on several years of extensive research and interviews, includes previously unpublished photographs, previously unpublished poetry, and anecdotes by those who were there..
Price: $12.45 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Meet two unforgettable gay heroes in one wild murder mystery!

When circuit party boy Ross Pretty succumbs to an overdose of Ecstasy, his death is ruled accidental That is, until former lover and top-level secret agent Bradford Fairfax comes to Provincetown. In The P'Town Murders, Brad at first thinks he's pretty well pinned Ross's murder on Hayden Rosengarten, a wealthy, evil-minded entrepreneur. But then Hayden turns up dead. And he won't be the last to die. Now not only must Brad solve a series of puzzling murders in 'the gayest place on earth,' but he also must find a way to stop an insidious plan to assassinate the Dalai Lama.

While investigating P'Town's darker side, Brad meets up with a figure from his past, the strangely talented, blue-haired Zachary Tyler. Is Zach all that he claims?

And what of Big Ruby, Brad's diminutive lesbian rescuer and owner of Coffee Joe's, who keeps one eye on her regulars and the other on her gun? And then there's Cinder Lindquist, the flirtatious female impersonator with a thousand faces. Which face is real? And why is every second person Bradford meets a dyed-in-the-wool Buddhist?

An excerpt from The P'Town Murders

Hayden's face feigned disbelief. "Why would you want me, with all those strapping young lads downstairs?" He made a deprecating gesture with his hands. "I know I may seem a little rough on them at times, but they're like family to me. Suffer the children," he intoned piously.

"Some kids like it rough," Brad said with a wink. "And a few of us even enjoy a little 'suffering' now and then."

Come on, Brad was thinking. Show me how far you would go. "In fact," he continued, "I think we might even share similar tastes. Certain dark tastes for . . . forbidden things."

He was staring right into Hayden's crystal blue eyes. He could feel the man's breath on his shoulder. Okay, so sometimes I have to do more than keep just my mind on my job, Brad told himself. Grace might not approve, but Grace doesn't have to know everything.

Hayden smiled and leaned back on the desk as though considering something. That's when they heard the first gunshot.

The P'Town Murders takes you on a wild ride that is fun, entertaining, and sexy as hell.

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Price: $14.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

12 previously uncollected experimental shorter plays: The Chalky White Substance • The Day on Which a Man Dies (An Occidental Noh Play) • A Cavalier for Milady • The Pronoun "I" • The Remarkable Rooming House of Mme. LeMonde • Kirche, Küche, Kinder (An Outrage for the Stage) • Green Eyes • The Parade • The One Exception • Sunburst • Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis? • The Traveling Companion

Even with his great commercial success, Tennessee Williams always considered himself an experimental playwright. In the last 25 years of his life his explorations increased—especially in shorter forms and one-act plays—as Williams created performance pieces with elements of theater of the absurd, theater of cruelty, theater of the ridiculous, as well as motifs from Japanese forms such as Noh and Kabuki, high camp and satire, and with innovative visual and verbal styles that were entirely his own.

Influenced by Beckett, Genet, and Pinter, among others, Williams worked hard to expand the boundaries of the lyric realism he was best known for. These plays were explicitly intended to be performed off-off Broadway or regionally. Sometimes disturbing, sometimes outrageous, quite often the tone of these plays is rough, bawdy or even cartoonish. While a number of these plays employ what could be termed bizarre "happy endings," others gaze unblinkingly into the darkness.

Though several of Williams' lesser-known works from this period have already been published by New Directions, these twelve plays have never been collected. Most of these shorter plays are unknown to audiences and scholars—some are published here for the first time—yet all of them embrace, in one way or another, what Time magazine called "the four major concerns that have spurred Williams' dramatic imagination: loneliness, love, the violated heart and the valiancy of survival.".
Price: $10.76 [Notify me when price goes down.]

B. H. Friedman, who wrote the first biography of Jackson Pollock, returns in "Tripping" to the time, shortly after Pollock died, when the author and wife participated in the early drug experiements conducted by Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist. Much of this memoir is based on reports Friedman wrote to Dr. Leary and on correspondence with him and others. The author creates a candid and fascinating portrait of the firsthand effect of "tripping," and the ultimate price some paid when dreams of innocence and liberation turned into nightmares. A true flashback to a turbulent time of excess and exhilaration, "Tripping" is the dramatic account of one man's journey through personal and professional upheaval and toward enlightenment..
Price: $20.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A dark, brilliant novel of astonishing pitch, set in Provincetown, a “spit of shrub and dune” captured here in the rawness and melancholy of the off-season, Tough Guys Don’t Dance is the story of Tim Madden, an unsuccessful writer addicted to bourbon, cigarettes, and blonde, careless women with money. On the twenty-fourth morning after the decampment of his wife, Patty Lareine, he awakens with a hangover, considerable sexual excitement, and, on his upper arm, a red tattoo bearing a name from the past. Of the night before, he remembers practically nothing. What he soon learns is that the front passenger seat of his Porsche is soaked with blood and that in a secluded corner of his marijuana stash in a nearby woods rests a blonde head, severed at the throat.
Is Madden therefore a murderer? He has no way of knowing. As in many novels of crime, the narrative centers on violence—physical, sexual, and emotional—but these elements move in their orbits through a rich constellation of character as Madden tries to reconstruct the missing hours of a terrible evening. In the course of this in-quiry a bizarre and vividly etched gallery of characters reappears to him as in a dream—ex-prizefighters, sexual junkies, mediums, former cons, a police chief, a world-weary former girl friend, and Mad-den’s father, old now but still a Herculean figure, a practitioner of the sternest backroom ethics.
Tough Guys Don’t Dance represents Mailer at the peak of his powers with a stunningly conceived novel that soon transcends its origins as a mystery to become a relentless search into the recesses and buried virtues of the modern American male. Rarely, as many readers will discern, have the paradoxes of machismo and homosexuality been so well explored..
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