WLes amitiés particulières is a 1943 novel by French writer Roger Peyrefitte, probably his best-known work today, which won the Prix Renaudot. Largely autobiographical, it deals with an intimate relationship between two boys at a Roman Catholic boarding school and how it is destroyed by a priest's will to protect them from homosexuality.
WThe City and the Pillar is the third published novel by American writer Gore Vidal, written in 1946 and published on January 10, 1948. The story is about a young man who is coming of age and discovers his own homosexuality.
WConfessions of a Mask is Japanese author Yukio Mishima's second novel. First published in 1949, it launched him to national fame though he was only in his early twenties.
WMiracle of the Rose is a 1946 book by Jean Genet about experiences as a detainee in Mettray Penal Colony and Fontevrault prison, although there is no direct evidence of Genet ever having been imprisoned in the latter establishment. This autobiographical work has a non-linear structure: stories from Genet's adolescence are mixed in with his experiences as a thirty-year-old man at Fontevrault prison. At Mettray, Genet describes homosexual erotic desires for his fellow adolescent detainees. There is also a fantastical dimension to the narrative, particularly in Fontevrault passages concerning a prisoner called Harcamone who is condemned to death for murder. Genet idolises Harcamone and writes poetically about the rare occasions on which he catches a glimpse of this character. Genet was detained in Mettray Penal Colony between 2 September 1926 and 1 March 1929, after which, at the age of 18, he joined the Foreign Legion.
WOther Voices, Other Rooms is a 1948 novel by Truman Capote. It is written in the Southern Gothic style and is notable for its atmosphere of isolation and decadence.
WOur Lady of the Flowers (Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs) is the debut novel of French writer Jean Genet, first published in 1943. The free-flowing, poetic novel is a largely autobiographical account of a man's journey through the Parisian underworld. The characters are drawn after their real-life counterparts, who are mostly homosexuals living on the fringes of society.
WQuerelle of Brest is a novel by the French writer Jean Genet. It was written mostly in 1945 and first published anonymously in 1947, limited to 460 numbered copies, with illustrations by Jean Cocteau. It is set in the midst of the port town of Brest, where sailors and the sea are associated with murder. Georges Querelle, its protagonist, is a bisexual thief, prostitute and serial killer who manipulates and kills his lovers for thrills and profit. The novel formed the basis for Querelle (1982), Rainer Werner Fassbinder's last film.
WReflections in a Golden Eye is a 1941 novel by American author Carson McCullers.
WThe Thief's Journal is a novel by Jean Genet. It is a part-fact, part-fiction autobiography that charts the author's progress through Europe in a depoliticized 1930s, wearing nothing but rags and enduring hunger, contempt, fatigue and vice. The main character encounters bars, dives, flophouses, robbery, prison and expulsion in Spain, Italy, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Nazi Germany and Belgium.