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'Im Sommer 1963 verliebte ich mich, und mein Vater ertrank.'So beginnt die Erzählung über einen Sommer, an dessen Ende nichts mehr so ist wie zuvor: Wie jedes Jahr verbringt der fünfzehnjährige Michael die Ferien mit seinen Eltern am Atlantik. Doch diesmal gibt es eine Veränderung, denn in dem benachbarten Gästehaus zieht die verführerische Mrs. Mertz mit ihrer zwanzigjährigen Tochter Zina ein. Die Andersartigkeit und Offenheit, die die beiden Frauen umgeben, faszinieren nicht nur Michael. Augenblicklich verliebt er sich in die schöne Zina und ist ihren Kaprizen hoffnungslos ausgeliefert. Als er jedoch seine romantischen Gefühle ihr gegenüber auf die grausamste Art und Weise verraten sieht, bricht für ihn die unschuldige Welt seiner Kindheit zusammen, und es kommt zum tragischen Ende eines Sommers. In der Neuerzählung von Turgenjews Novelle «Erste Liebe» schildert Simmons einfühlsam und fast ein wenig wehmütig den Verlust der kindlichen Unschuld, der die Verwirrungen der ersten Liebe begleitet. Den Hintergrund dazu bilden die Farben und Stimmungen eines Sommers am Meer.

A beleaguered young editor at a famous girly magazine swears off sex, only to find himself more deeply mired in lust and love than ever beforeThere are perks to working at a men's magazine that unabashedly celebrates the unclothed female form. However, the constant parade of exquisitely beautiful women strolling in and out of Oliver Bacon's office can prove most distracting.Oliver opts to treat his situation with extreme measures: he resolves to try celibacy. But being chaste is easier said than done when one is toiling in a garden of earthly delights, with temptation blooming all around. The challenge gets even more difficult when a particular darling turns up to plunge Oliver's life and libido both into pure chaos. In an insightful and outrageous romp, Charles Simmons wickedly charts the minefields of lust and love.

A young writer-to-be embarks on a comic coming-of-age journey through the crushing mediocrity of work, the vagaries of fate, and the mysteries of sexA confused and conflicted but not altogether angry young man shares his observations, disappointments, rants, and sexual desires in a revealing series of letters to an unnamed friend. Our hero wants to be a writer, but is stuck doing mind-numbing work for an unscrupulous encyclopedia publisher. He muddles through two engagements, one to a bright-eyed Catholic virgin, the other to a woman pregnant with another man's child. And the Great American Novel he is writing—about a man named Austin who is becoming invisible—may be a bit too much for the reading public to handle. But as long as he's got his friends (like Jose, who is determined to bed and wed his cousin Rita the nun), his health (no thanks to the medical establishment that killed his father), and his libido, everything should turn out okay.Winner of the William Faulkner Foundation Award for notable first novel—more outrageous than Catcher in the Rye and more scandalous than Portnoy's Complaint—Charles Simmons's Powdered Eggs is an unforgettable view of young American life through an amusingly jaundiced eye.

A brilliantly original examination of the many aspects that make up a life—from birth, up and over the hill, and into the wilderness of old ageA truly astonishing and original work of fiction, Wrinkles is the story of a life lived forty-four times, from childhood to adulthood to old age. It is a story of one man, a writer, who is born, who grows, who loves, who stops loving; who eats, sleeps, smokes, lies, boozes, cheats, regrets, has sex, has dreams, and lives. In short yet intimately detailed chapters, each covering a single aspect of his life from youth through old age, we get to know this person fully through the small yet telling incidents that make him who he is. He remembers the taste of a cigarette, the feel of his army uniform, the scent of a lover, the strange and unexpected touch of a college professor's hand, and so many more small experiences that can never be shaken off.At once poignant, funny, and troubling, Charles Simmons's Wrinkles is a dissection of an ordinary existence made extraordinary through reflection—a brilliant celebration of the not-so-simple act of being alive.

In the summer of 1963 I fell in love and my father drowned....So begins this sweet, ominous novel by Charles Simmons. Set against an idyllic landscape of water, sand, and sky, it recounts in exquisite detail the momentous events of a boy's 16th summer that reveal to him the dark facts of adult passion. On Bone Point, an island off the New England coast, the boy's long, lazy days of boating and swimming are sharpened by a growing awareness of his charismatic father's infidelities. Add to this the presence of a flirtatious middle-aged woman and her beautiful 20-year-old daughter, who have rented the guesthouse, and the tale is set in motion. This tautly constructed novel is both startling and haunting—an irresistible story of memory, desire, and suspense.