Dog Days: White Nights

by David Rees

DOG DAYS, WHITE NIGHTS which David says is "half a travel book", is a collection of essays on a variety of subjects: place, books, music, gay life, AIDS. It ranges in subject matter from prehistoric furniture and sexy young men in the Orkney Islands to puffins and shipwrecks in the Scillies; from Benjamin Britten to gay book reviewers; from casual sexual encounters to the "AIDS-is-the-best-thing-that-happened-to-me" brigade; from DON GIOVANNI as an AIDS metaphor to a consideration of Hana Mandlikova's shoes. Through much of it is an evocation of a vanished past - the Isle of Skye as it used to be, long-lost lovers, winters before global warming, "vanishing me," as David Rees says - it is not all nostalgia. More genial and less angry than LETTERS TO DOROTHY, the new collection of essays is also a witty and thorough assessment of some of the pleasures and pains that one gay man with the AIDS virus is experiencing now.

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

David Rees was born in London in 1936, but lived most of his adult life in Devon, where for many years he taught English Literature at Exeter University and at California State University, San Jose. In 1984, he took early retirement in order to write full-time. Author of forty-two books, he is best known for his children's novel The Exeter Blitz, which in 1978 was awarded the Carnegie Medal (UK), and The Milkman's On His Way, which, having survived much absurd controversy in Parliament, is now regarded as something of a gay classic. He also won The Other Award (UK) for his historical novel The Green Bough of Liberty. David Rees died in 1993.