This book was like the tensest and most darkly compelling roller coaster ride that I could not get off until the devastating final page.
Emma Cline is so good at delineating the messy inner lives of young women. In this book, she charts with almost real-time microscopic detail the weeklong meltdown of one pretty, very lost young woman, Alexa, as she perpetrates fraud after fraud on members of a uberwealthy summer town in the Hamptons, as well as their staffers and servants.
I was agog at Alexa’s brazenness, horrified and touched by her obvious unwellness and chilled by her ever-increasing detachment from reality. I feared on every page that her jig would soon be up and beheld the conclusion, at a glittering outdoor party, the way one might stare dumbly at a slow-motion train wreck.
An incredible literary feat of holding the reader in absolute thrall to the narrative from the first to the very last page, with no let up whatsoever.
* A TIMES 'Book of 2023' * 'Addictive' STYLIST Books to Look Out For 2023 * 'Destined to be the status read of 2023' HARPER'S BAZAAR BEST NEW FICTION * 'The perfect summer read' CULTURE WHISPER * An EVENING STANDARD 'Best New Books for Spring' * A Financial Times Best Summer Read 2023 *
Summer is coming to a close on Long Island, and Alex is no longer welcome...
One misstep at a dinner party and the older man she's been staying with dismisses her with a ride to the train station and a ticket back to the city. With…
Andrew Holleran is my favorite gay writer, and one of my favorite writers overall, because his powers of description are so sumptuous and vivid that he can make even the most banal things, like what summertime dusk looks and feels like on a boring suburban street, transformatively beautiful, almost hallucinatory.
He has also taken autofiction to the highest levels of artistry, from his most famous book, Dancer from the Dance, about hedonistic and empty gay life in early 1970s NYC, to all the subsequent books, which chart the life cycle for a gay man without a partner or children.
As he nears 80, The Kingdom of Sand is an account of the waning years of life that is so bleak and spectral that it’s beautiful in its sheer rendering on the page. The book is about the almost eventless lives of gay men as they approach death, but, as in his other books, Holleran carves an almost sacred beauty out of unremarkable nothingness, such that a depiction of two old gay men watching old Hollywood movies together becomes a scene of heartbreaking depth and complexity.
The Kingdom of Sand is a poignant tale of desire and dread-Andrew Holleran's first new book in sixteen years. The nameless narrator is a gay man who moved to Florida to look after his aging parents-during the height of the AIDS epidemic-and has found himself unable to leave after their deaths. With gallows humor, he chronicles the indignities of growing old in a small town.
At the heart of the novel is the story of his friendship with Earl, whom he met cruising at the local boat ramp. For the last twenty years, he has been visiting Earl to watch…
This book dazzles on so many levels it’s almost head-spinning.
It’s the almost-real-time tale of a Black transgender woman, Carlotta Mercedes, who comes back to her Brooklyn family and neighborhood after 20 years in prison, to find, Rip Van Winkle-like, that almost everything has changed and that she feels like a ghost walking back into a world she recalls so differently.
Loosely based on Ulysses, it plays out entirely in one July Fourth weekend, with almost no jump cuts. In a feat I don’t think I’ve ever seen a novel pull off, the narration constantly toggles, even in the same sentence, between a close third on Carlotta and her own crazy, funny, and heartbreaking inner voice.
It manages to be an unflinching look at what poverty, racism, and transphobia look like in the life of one person, and yet to call Carlotta a victim, despite her humiliations, would be wrong, because ultimately the book is about an indomitable spirit and lust for life and freedom that cannot be broken.
In this “dangerously hilarious” novel (Los Angeles Times), a trans woman reenters life on the outside after more than twenty years in a men’s prison, over one consequential Fourth of July weekend—from the author of the PEN/Faulkner Award winner Delicious Foods.
Carlotta Mercedes has been misunderstood her entire life. When she was pulled into a robbery gone wrong, she still went by the name she’d grown up with in Fort Greene, Brooklyn—before it gentrified. But not long after her conviction, she took the name Carlotta and began to live as a woman, an embrace of selfhood that prison authorities rejected,…
Witty, propulsive, and ultimately poignant, Speech Team is the tale of four estranged friends—all of them former nerds or closeted gay kids who competed together on speech team together in high school in the 1980s—who awkwardly reunite 25 years later to track down and confront the retired teacher and speech team coach who was both their mentor and tormentor. Driven not only by 1980s nostalgia but by the question, “Do you think people remember the devastating things they said to us that we’ve never forgotten?”, Speech Team explores how we carry adolescent hurts just beneath the surface of our competent adult selves, as well as how people do and do not change over the course of many years.
