Best American Gay Fiction #2

by Bernard Cooper, Mitch Cullin (Contributor), Brian Bouldrey (Editor)

Following the success of last year's debut volume, this Best American Gay Fiction collection broadens the range of contributors, styles, and genres. Here is outstanding new work by such well-known writers as Andrew Holleran, Dale Peck, Michael Nava, and David Wojnarowicz alongside fresh talents who capture the full spectrum of gay life today -- African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans. The impressive writing presented here -- all drawn from works published in 1996 -- reflects this diversity as well, and ranges from coming-of-age narratives to reflections on growing older, from edgy 'zine fiction to elegant tales wrought with lapidary precision.

Unified only by their excellence, these twenty-one selections are resounding proof of yet another banner year for gay fiction.

Genres: LGBT, Short Stories, Fiction

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Bernard Cooper has won numerous awards and prizes, among them the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award, an O. Henry Prize, and literature fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and The National Endowment of the Arts.

He has published two memoirs, Maps to Anywhere and Truth Serum, as well as a novel, A Year of Rhymes, and a collection of short stories, Guess Again.

His work has appeared in Harper's Magazine, Gentleman's Quarterly, and The Paris Review and in several volumes of The Best American Essays.

He lives in Los Angeles and is the art critic for Los Angeles Magazine.

Reviews

[Aidan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good, this is, depressing too it is, yes. Something about the intense loneliness of an identity separated from the norm by who you would have sex with, mixed with the AIDS era and a lack of public positivity leads to the writing of some of the most isolated and nostalgiac works I have ever read. I found these stories brutal, and it reminds me that very rarely are stories written out of contentment. From the Diaries of a Wolfboy, Chicken Man, Shapes, are all stories that rank up there with any other book I've read.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

I find it odd that in twenty five years this wonderful volume has attracted only two reviews (though both gave it five stars) and one of them concerned itself entirely with praising the cover design (which I would agree is very good). Anyway I only want to praise this volume and at the same time look back with astonishment that in the less than twenty odd years since the Violet Quill group first began meeting gay writing was strong enough to support, in the same year, this anthology, as well as the latest Men on Men anthology and the new His and Her anthologies of gay and lesbian writing (as well as many other individual authored and themed anthologies). I would be amazed if anyone, even today, could not find authors whose work they wanted to pursue in a longer format in this and the other volumes I mention. I have no doubt that many authors today would be jealous of the wealth of outlets for new writers compared to today.

This, like the other volumes in this series, is a superb anthology and contains fine writing and ample recommendations for further reading. The only quibble I have is that in terms of information on were various works appeared, there are numerous examples of outlets and magazines etc. which no longer exist and, for all their fame in 1997 are now so forgotten as to be a difficult to trace on google. This is even more the case with anthologies were no editor or publishing details are given.

[Shawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most brilliant cover ever. If you don't get it immediately, you probably won't.