Lessons from Cruising

By Martin Goodman

Category: All Books, Fiction, LGBTQ+

Formats available: Paperback, Ebook

Publication date: 06/08/24

ISBN-13: 9780956336439

ISBN-10: 0956336434

An assembly of tales, from Britain, the USA, and the seas in between, explore different expressions of the gay male experience.

The Lovely Life of Arnold drops into the life of New York fashionista Arnold, in seven-year leaps from the age of seven to forty-two. From birth, Arnold’s parents knew their family was perfect and complete, because nothing could be better than a gay son.

Lessons from Cruising sees an Asian schoolteacher link up with a multi-millionaire businessman one early morning, by the Thames. They head out on the rich man’s yacht, in the company of the rich man’s son and friend.

Billy Budd: Captain Vere’s Account reprises Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, but for the first time takes the reader inside the stateroom on the ship, where the captain confronts Billy with the verdict of the courtroom.

“Powerful and affecting work” – Paul Russell, author of Immaculate Blue

“Wild, irreverent and fetching” – Jay Parini, author of Borges and Me

Reviews

Martin Goodman’s wild, irreverent and fetching stories pulled me in. I was especially taken by his Melvillian outtake on Billy Budd, the fine last story in this collection, which is moving and weirdly plausible.

- Jay Parini, author of The Passages of Herman Melville and Borges and Me

A ravishing collection, remarkably wide-ranging in subject, mood and tone, each story exquisitely crafted. A complicated young man embarked on a romantic adventure and diving into deeper water than he can safely navigate. A clergyman shedding his faith as he retraces the footsteps of St. Paul. Several linked tales chronicling lovely Arnold's wondrous, ultimately bittersweet wet dream of a life. A boldly imagined 'missing' scene from Melville's Billy Budd. These stories explore the cadences and crises of gay men's lives with fine, empathetic insight. Goodman's attention to detail often combines with verbal felicity to memorialize even the most ordinary moments. Powerful and affecting work.

- Paul Russell, author of Immaculate Blue

Welcome to Barbican Press

Martin Goodman

Martin Goodman was born in Leicester and grew up in Loughborough, attending the grammar school there, before spinning off into the world. Early career thoughts were of being a chef or a lawyer, and indeed when studying English at Leeds University he almost switched to Law. A comparison of the reading lists held him back. Later he took a teaching degree in English as a Second Language, and early years saw him teaching English overseas to earn money and experience, and then spending it all on time to write before …

Related News & Articles

Writing Short Gay Fiction

Lockdown 2020 and the view from my writing table in Lowestoft was of the North Sea. Winds blew. I was going nowhere. Here was my chance to follow Herman Melville out across the ocean. Ishmael, the narrator of Melville’s Moby-Dick, takes us into the bed he shares with the Pacific …

Rewriting Billy Budd from Benjamin Britten’s hometown

The stories in Martin Goodman’s new collection Lessons from Cruising come from across the globe, a couple stemming from Covid and the year of lockdown. ‘We locked ourselves away in Britain’s most easterly point, and different aspects of Lowestoft life sparked a pandemic story. Things like the kittiwakes nesting on …