Mark Merlis

"Joel Lingeman has it all: an overpaid sinecure advising Congress, a fifteen-year partnership with a perfectly adequate lover, a cozy circle of drinking buddies. Until one day his world implodes. His lover runs off, working for Congress threatens to turn him into a felon, and Joel is hurled back, out of condition, into the dating game he couldn't manage twenty years earlier." "Amid the rubble he finds himself clinging to an image from his boyhood: a model in a swimsuit ad, buried in the back of a magazine, who had beckoned to young Joel to step through the page and into another life. Aided by a detective who is more elusive than his quarry, Joel sets out to discover the real person he knows only from a fading photograph. What begins as a quest for an idyll in the New Mexico hills ends in New Jersey, where a rundown split-level turns out to be a shrine to everyday heroism and ordinary happiness." "Joel's journey overlays a critique of the cynicism and buffoonery of Capitol Hill and a gently acerbic account of how people break up and how they get together."--BOOK JACKET.

The siege of Troy has dragged on for ten years, with no end in sight, when an oracle supplies the Greeks with the recipe for victory. All they need is Pyrrhus, son of the fallen Achilles. But Pyrrhus has been putting his godlike form to profitable use as a go-go dancer in the big city. Why should he leave the party, give up his hard-bought freedom, just because some voice in a jar says he must strap on a suit of hand-me-down armor? Still, Pyrrhus has always known destiny had plans for him, some more glittering future than life as a used-up hustler on a park bench somewhere. So he sails for Troy, hoping to transform himself into the bronzed immortal history requires. Instead, on an unscheduled detour, he stumbles through his first lessons on how to be a man. Magically blending ancient headlines and modern myth, Merlis creates a fabulous new world where legendary heroes declare their endowments in the personal ads and any panhandler just might be a divinity in disguise. Comical, moving, startling in its audacity and range, An Arrow’s Flight is a profound meditation on gay identity, straight power, and human liberation.