Harlan's Race: A Novel [Hardcover]

Patricia Nell Warren (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 1994

In 1974, The Front Runner was published, a novel of love and loss that became a best-loved classic about gay life. Now, twenty years later, comes the sequel - a story of passion, and victory pulled from defeat.

After his young athlete lover is assassinated on the Olympic track in Montreal, coach Harlan Brown is forced to enter the race of his life. To survive the hate and violence which threaten his chosen family - Betsy, valiant lesbian mother, Vince, angry activist seeking revenge, Chino, Vietnam vet with a wounded heart, and the secret child of Billy Sive, The Front Runner.

In time, a second chance at love comes. Vince Matti, 25, a runner who was Billy's best friend, has harbored an unrequited passion for his ex-Marine coach. Handsome, volatile, and passionate, Vince challenges Harlan's stoic and lonely heart in unimagined ways. Harlan must race with the shadow of the past - that memory of the brief idyll with Billy - and reach a present where love is enduring and real.

Meanwhile, Harlan's ordeal with bias and bloodshed is not over. Snipers often work in pairs, and the Montreal shooter evidently had a cohort who escaped arrest. This mysterious stalker moves implacably into Harlan's world. And yet another stalker is moving into gay life - a disease that has no name. As events move to the climax, Harlan runs the most desperate race of his life - risking everything to win the victory torn from his hands at Montreal.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Patricia Nell Warren is the landmark author of some of the most popular gay novels of all time. Each of her books has been a milestone in America’s understanding and acceptance of GBLT themes. Her most beloved work, The Front Runner, has sold an estimated ten million copies in ten languages. The first modern story about gay love to become an international bestseller, Warren’s celebrated saga of an ex-Marine track coach and his Olympics-bound athlete has engaged and inspired both gay and mainstream readers for over a quarter of a century. Warren’s novels have also sold heavily to libraries and are used in numerous college courses. Wildcat Press is Ms. Warren’s exclusive imprint, offering some of the best in enduring gay literature. Established in 1993, the dynamic independent publisher has released both past and present bestsellers, winning it critical acclaim. Current titles include, The Front Runner, Billy’s Boy, Harlan’s Race, The Fancy Dancer, The Beauty Queen, One Is The Sun, and The Wild Man. Dedicated to furthering free speech, Wildcat Press has been one of the plaintiffs for the ACLU in several recent landmark lawsuits, two of which went to the United States Supreme Court. Wildcat maintains that we are all one community regardless of race, creed, or sexual orientation, and that tolerance brings understanding and acceptance.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 324 pages
• Publisher: Wildcat Press (May 1, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0964109905
• ISBN-13: 978-0964109902
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #862,755 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

PATRICIA NELL WARREN

AUTHOR, PUBLISHER AND ACTIVIST

BIOGRAPHY


Patricia Nell Warren has written and published professionally since 1954, at age 18. In 54 years, her subjects have ranged from women and Goddess Earth to human rights, from gay life and mixed-blood people in American history to wildlife, the environment and current events.

Now 73 years old, she was born in 1936 and raised on a Montana ranch. She worked as a Reader's Digest book editor for 15 years, on both the magazine staff and the Condensed Book Club.

Today Warren lives in Los Angeles, where she co-owns an independent book-publishing and media company, Wildcat International, in partnership with media specialist/writer Tyler St. Mark.

Fiction

Since 1971 Warren has published eight novels -- several with mainstream publishers (Morrow, Bantam, Ballantine, Dial Press, Penguin) and several under her own independent imprint, Wildcat Press. The Front Runner, Harlan's Race and Billy's Boy are a landmark series that follows an evolving family through 20 years of gay life. Her most recent gay-themed novel is The Wild Man, a bestseller that came out in 2001.

She also published two mainstream novels, The Last Centennial (1971) and One Is the Sun (1991), as well as four books of Ukrainian poetry.

Warren's best-known fiction work, The Front Runner, was first published by William Morrow in 1974, and became the most popular gay love story of all time. The book has sold an estimated 10 million copies worldwide and been translated into ten languages, the most recent being Italian.

Film rights of The Front Runner have been in development for some years, and recently received a great deal attention as one of "Hollywood's unmade gay films" during Brokeback Mountain's run-up for the Academy Awards.

Currently Warren is working on a new novel titled Wrong Side of the Tracks.

Nonfiction

Warren's newest title is her first nonfiction book. It's titled The Lavender Locker Room, an anthology of nonfiction articles about gay pioneers in sports history, that appeared on Outsports.com. Published in 2006, it was an Amazon history topseller, won the Independent Publisher Gold Medal in the gay-lesbian category, and was a finalist in the Benjamin Franklin Awards.

Warren's articles and op-eds have appeared in a variety of mainstream publications, including Atlantic Monthly, Los Angeles Times, Reader's Digest, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Modern Maturity, Persimmon Hill, New York Press, Des Moines Register, Mythosphere, Corporate Africa. She has also published in various leading gay publications.

For A & U Magazine she writes a monthly column on the politics of AIDS and public health. Online, she blogs at The Bilerico Project, the most popular and politically vociferous glbt blog on the Web, as well as the Huffington Post.

She is also writing further sports profiles for Outsports.com and Lavender Locker Room II.

Film Development

As a result of interest in movies based on her novels, Warren has moved into active development herself as an executive producer, in partnership with Greg Zanfardino of Moniker Entertainment.

At present, she has several docudrama projects on her slate, including an Australian group's novel search for the wreck site of Amelia Earhart's aircraft in Papua New Guinea.

Activism and Politics

Warren's political activism started during the 1960s, with efforts -- while still a Reader's Digest editor -- to have American media recognize the individuality of Ukrainians and other ethnic groups in the USSR.

In the 1970s Warren was the plaintiffs' spokesperson for Susan Smith v. Reader's Digest, a landmark lawsuit that resulted in a class-action victory for women. As a former amateur athlete, Warren helped lead a group of women distance runners who forced the AAU (Amateur Athletic Union, the then governing body of amateur sports in the U.S.) to change discriminatory rules in the mid-70s.

More recently, in the free-speech realm, Warren has been a named plaintiff in both federal lawsuits over Internet censorship -- namely ACLU v. Reno (which went to the U.S. Supreme Court and resulted in a victory for the plaintiffs) and the more recent ACLU lawsuit over the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), which was also struck down as unconstitutional.

Her most recent political step was her first time out as a candidate in 2007. She ran for city council in West Hollywood, CA, on a platform that included a goal of WeHo being the first in the country to offer universal single-payer healthcare to its residents. She lost to an incumbent, but ran a creditable campaign and got 23 percent of the vote.

As recognition for her activism and contribution to public, Warren has won a number of awards, including New York City's Public Advocate Award and the Barry Goldwater Award.


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More information on Warren can be found at : www.wildcatpress.com and www.patricianellwarren.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Nice Follow Up, June 23, 2001

By 

Brett Benner (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Harlan's Race: A Novel (Paperback)

"Harlan's Race" doesn't feel as much a sequel, as a continuation. The book picks up right where the "Front Runner" left off, with Billy Sive being murdered at the Olympic Games, and it's aftermath.I was glad I had re-read "...Runner" before I started this because it helped keep the characters fresh in my mind. Nell Warren succeeds in keeping Harlan's voice a barometer of the changing times as the seventies gives way to the somewhat more tolerant 80s.The backbone of the book is really a mystery novel with an apparent accomplice in Billy's murder still loose and aiming at Harlan. I thought for the most part this was successful although the identity of the mystery person began to be telegraphed towards the end which took some suspense out of it.My only other slight disappointment with the book was the leaping of years towards the end to bring the story closer to the present. Knowing this book may be part of a total of four books, I almost wish she'd taken more time and detailed the years that are lost by being summarized on a few pages. Still I was glad to be back in Harlan's head for a while. It felt like talking with an old friend.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Finally - the sequel !!!!, July 10, 2001

By 

Get What We Give (Georgia) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Harlan's Race: A Novel (Hardcover)

How do you write a sequel to a gay American classic? Ask Patricia Nell Warren. She's done it! I can't say that I was always happy with the choices she made but I have to agree that they were the right ones.

No, this isn't the Front Runner. But then no book could be. The 70's offered the gay male a new sensibility about his sexuality. It allowed him to realize that he was not some horrible outcast in modern society. The Front Runner was a romance that gay men had been waiting for since the beginning of time. Where E. M. Forster's Maurice was a romance, it unrealistically allowed the characters to have an unqualified happy ending. Warren did not. Warren gave her characters flesh, blood, and oxygen that had been so lacking in so many previous gay themed novels. I cried my eyes out when I first read The Front Runner. Because I had waited almost twenty years for the sequel, I tore through it with a vengeance. We can't hope for the love and joy that we experienced reading The Front Runner. That wonderful book's ending couldn't allow Harlan's Race to be nearly as idealistic or uplifting. However, it does provide us with a carefully crafted, believable memorial to gay fiction's (possibly most loved) character: Billy Sive. In twenty years I've moved from Billy's age to Harlan's and I found that his skin fit me well. Read this book, if you've read the first one. If not, start there and work your way forward. This is great storytelling. Warren's books should be required reading for Pat Robertson and his contemporaries. Maybe then, they would understand "forbidden love".

I have to give the book four stars instead of five simply because it's missing my favorite character.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Stronger Kick than the original, February 26, 2003

By 

G. Toscano (Pasig, Philippines) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Harlan's Race: A Novel (Paperback)

Reading Harlan's Race for the first time is like a refreshing slap to the face. I love The Frontrunner and Billy but in a way, throughout the years and the way it has been heralded as THE gay classic of all time, has made it seem less realistic and almost fable-like and surreal (despite the shocking conclusion).

This book relates the events that happened after Billy's murder and maybe, I can relate to it more, because it deals with death and rebirth, agony and triumph, hatred and love in a way that is more tangible, even grittier and harsher than but nonetheless as beautiful as the Frontrunner.