Lovesick Libertine

LOVESICK LIBERTINE: A Short Story Collection by Buddy Devine From the gaslit parlors of Victorian London to the open highways of the American north country, Lovesick Libertine follows lovers, drifters, and dreamers who refuse to live inside the cages the world builds for them. These twelve stories map desire in all its wild, desperate, and gorgeous forms. A society man is undone by the dandy who got away — the incandescent Lord Andre Denton, who burst out of their shared boyhood and into legend while his devoted friend stayed behind to polish his cage until he forgot it was one. A trans hitchhiker fakes their own death to be reborn on the open road. A queer time-traveler stumbles into free love in the summer of 1969. A wheelchair-bound boy discovers his own extraordinary story in the long shadow of a golden brother. Story after story, characters choose liberation over legibility — and pay the price, or collect the reward, or find that the two are the same thing. Funny, filthy, tender, and strange, Lovesick Libertine is a love letter to the pleasure-seekers and the heartbroken, the ones who live too loudly and the ones who have gone too long without making a sound. It is a book for everyone who has ever felt like a cathedral locked for twenty years — beautiful, cold, and waiting for the door to finally blow open.