Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction - Hardcover

A distinguished anthology by 32 American and British male authors, these stories and sketches fulfill what White ( A Boy's Own Story ) calls the "twin urges" of gay fiction--"the obligation to explain and the ambition to excite." Stunningly written is Allan Gurganus's explicit "Forced Use," in which a married man who has denied his sexual orientation is ravished by a raw youth at a highway rest stop. Modern gay literature goes back to the cautious involutions of Henry James in "The Pupil," in which death resolves the bond between boy and tutor; entries by E. M. Forster, Ronald Firbank and Christopher Isherwood also tend to obliqueness. Denton Welch's "When I Was Thirteen" sensitivity depicts a bracing but innocent encounter at a Swiss ski resort. Alfred Chester pens an ode to the degraded glories of the Paris urinal in his excellent "In Praise of Vespasian." Tennessee Williams ("Two on a Party") describes an affectionate odyssey between "a female lush and a fairy." James Baldwin grows frank and reverent in "Just Above My Head." Portraits of the beloved feature in White's poignant "Skinned Alive" and Dennis Cooper's "My Mark." Motifs recur: parental showdowns, avoidance of women, haunting boyhood affairs, styles of male beauty, dress and courtship, and, more recently, AIDS. The collection offers a revealing and rewarding excursion into a subculture's language and mores.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Collections of gay male fiction are published all the time, but it has been well over a decade since an anthology has attempted to be as truly representative as this volume, edited by well-known novelist White. Starting with Henry James and including E.M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood, William Burroughs, Tennessee Williams, and James Baldwin, among others, this anthology of short stories and novel extracts is noteworthy for its dazzling variety both in style and content. Among contemporary works there are AIDS-related stories (Andrew Holleran, Armistead Maupin, White himself), a precisely drawn narrative of the complexity of affectional ties by David Leavitt, and an excerpt from Alan Hollinghurst's frankly sexual The Swimming-Pool Library . If there is a thread throughout most of these stories, it is of displacement; as White notes in the introduction, "the gay man enjoys . . . a permanent sense of alienation from the tribe." This is for all fiction collections.
- Brian Kenney, St. John's Univ. Lib., Jamaica, N.Y.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.