The LA Times today has an interesting review of novelist David Levithan's new book, Two Boys Kissing. It gives us a good look at the novel, but also tells us about a previous novel he wrote, Boy Meets Boy: http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-david-levithan-20130901,0,2856052.story

But, at only 208 pages, is it a novel or a short story? Well, if it's interesting, then it doesn't much matter.

I guess when it is in an Arts & Literature forum, the idea of two boys kissing loses some sexuality. So I thought I might juice it up a bit with pix of...

Andy Towle at the blog towleroad.com reports"

Gay Teen Novel 'Two Boys Kissing' Makes National Book Award Longlist for Young People's Literature

The National Book Awards released its longlists today for Young People's Literature and Poetry.

Among those up for the award in Young People's Lit is David Levithan's gay teen novel Two Boys Kissing.

Levithan's novel interweaves the stories of a number of gay teens, foremost among them one couple who decides to break the world record for longest kiss.

Wrote the L.A. Times' Louis Bayard of the book:

Levithan interweaves all these players with surgical skill and with an unabashed attention to bodies. If the book's title doesn't get it banned from a thousand school libraries, its frankness will: "Peter lingers his hand down Neil's back, slips his fingers beneath his waistband, rests on the skin there, the heat. Neil moves in the opposite direction, his hand rising under the back of Peter's shirt, between his shoulder blades. ... Neil touches the nape of his neck, then slowly retreats back down, fingernails raking skin…."

What sets this book apart from Levithan's previous work (including the charming "Will Grayson, Will Grayson," co-written by John Green) is its yearning for tragedy. For brooding over these youths is a Greek chorus of ghosts: the generation of gay men who lived and loved and died in the first onslaught of AIDS.

"We are your shadow uncles," they declare, "your angel godfathers, your mother's or your grandfather's best friend from college, the author of that book you found in the gay section of the library."

Among those longlisted in Poetry is Frank Bidart's Metaphysical Dog.

Towleroad book critic Garth Greenwell praised the book in a review earlier this year.

For nearly half a century, Frank Bidart has been obsessed by a single theme. In this brilliant new collection, he calls it “hunger for the absolute”: our seemingly inescapable need for purity and perfection, for some significance that transcends the organic. Whether this hunger leads to philosophy or religion, politics or love or art, it both instills our lives with meaning and makes them intolerable.

...I’ve been reading Bidart for more than half my life, and with this new collection I feel again how much his work has become crucial to my sense not just of poetry but of my own "ordinary divided unsimple heart." Bidart’s work is one of the unfolding wonders of the literature of our time. Read this book.

Posted Sep. 17,2013 at 6:00 PM EST by Andy Towle in Awards, Books, David Levithan,

Read more: http://www.towleroad.com/#ixzz2fC0ysLwn

(For some reason, propriety perhaps, the boytoy software will not permit me to post a picture of the book.)

I still haven't read this novel, but kennethinthe212.com is touting it today:

"Two Boys Kissing" by David Levithan

Everyone's talking about this one since it made the 2013 National Book Award Longlist:
In his follow-up to the New York Times bestselling "Every Day," David Levithan, co-author of bestsellers "Will Grayson, Will Grayson" and "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist," tells the based-on-true-events story of Harry and Craig, two 17-year-olds who are about to take part in a 32-hour marathon of kissing to set a new "Guinness World Record" — all of which is narrated by a Greek Chorus of the generation of gay men lost to AIDS. While the two increasingly dehydrated and sleep-deprived boys are locking lips, they become a focal point in the lives of other teen boys dealing with languishing long-term relationships, coming out, navigating gender identity, and falling deeper into the digital rabbit hole of gay hookup sites — all while the kissing former couple tries to figure out their own feelings for each other