Begun as a response to a front page photograph illustrating a tragedy that the media quickly sensationalized in the early 2000's, Wolf tells the composite truth of two brothers, a family friend, a father, and a murder. Skeptical of news cycles and the way trials become page-turners, this book forgoes the standards of true crime: quick conclusions and moralistic underpinnings. Instead, motivated by an attempt to extend empathy, its reconstruction unfolds in tones of witness and meditation. What results is a story about the extremities to which deeply unchecked abuse and ongoing trauma can push a family.

This is a semi-autobiograpical novel about growing up in a strained working-class household transplanted to the South. Martin carefully brings out the curiosity of children on the verge of becoming sexual and their confusion in the midst of family violence.

On the fringes of the music scene in a Southern college town, a lonely young student driven to fl ee a troubled adolescence pursues and forms a life-altering relationship with an acclaimed artist-musician. Their understanding develops in a pattern of sex and reticence, soon impacting both their paths and greatly shifting expectations. Written "as if telling the truth was a matter of survival" (Andrew O'Hagan), it is a queer bildungsroman.

Culturing Writing. Art. In YOUR BODY FIGURED, Douglas A. Martin presents the reader with three prose pieces, each focused on an artist: the painter Balthus, the poet Hart Crane, and finally the Irish painter Francis Bacon as seen through his relationship with model and muse, George Dyer. Each section is a meditation on the relationship between art and life, artist and model, subject and object--evidence of the troubled landscape at the core of human desire and creative production. Martin reaches out to the reader through his near-incantatory use of the second person point-of-view, so that one constantly feels called upon to respond, to return to the text. Evoking a myriad of twentieth century writers--Kathy Acker, Marguerite Duras, Andre Gide, among others--Martin's work breaks from perceived form to create a trilogy of serial narratives that bring the life of the modern artist up against the limits of the body and language. Douglas A. Martin is the author of two novels (Branwell, Outline of My Lover), a book of stories (They Change the Subject), a collection of poetry (In the Time of Assignments) and a coauthor of a book of haiku. He lives in Brooklyn.

This book lets passionate encounters unfold like bits of film. Treacherously comic and poignant, the stories in ""They Change the Subject"" follow a young man's quest for identity through love and desire. Sustained by a single voice, the stories simultaneously offer a fractured novel and stand, powerfully, on their own. At the center of each tale is the heightened, visceral possibility of unexpected emotional encounters - from an escort's dates in Manhattan hotels to a photo shoot that doubles as seduction. Always pushing toward a bigger shiver of passion, Martin's young-man-on-the-make learns how to adapt his persona to suit his lovers' needs and tries to embrace his own experience - and his self - by becoming the purest object of desire.