QueerType: For Your Leisure Reading

Sunday, May 01, 2005

For Your Leisure Reading

My interview with author and editor Jim Gladstone about his new tattoo-themed gay fiction anthology Skin and Ink is now on line at Velvet Mafia. Jim is a terrific, enthusiastic, and gracious guy who I always enjoy hanging out with in his hometown of Philadelphia (where he has a terrific, huge apartment) or at places like Saints and Sinners in New Orleans. Rob Stephenson, Patrick Ryan, D. Travers Scott, James Williams, and Kal Cobalt also have great new fiction up in this issue of Velvet Mafia. I also love to help writers find new outlets for their work and I read Tom Cardamone’s Pacific Rimming in an early draft and thought it was superb. I’m so glad VM boss Sean Meriwether decided to put it on line. Part One is in this issue and Part Two will be in the next VM issue. Tom will also have a surreal story titled "Bottomfeeders" going up on line this summer at Sean’s other literary Web site, Outsider Ink.

The Haunted Heart and Other Tales
ghost stories by Jameson Currier

In his newest collection of short stories, The Haunted Heart and Other Tales, author Jameson Currier modernizes the traditional ghost story with gay lovers, loners, activists, and addicts, blending history and contemporary issues of the gay community with the unexpected of the supernatural.

“Jameson Currier’s The Haunted Heart and Other Tales expands upon the usual ghost story tropes by imbuing them with deep metaphorical resonance to the queer experience. Infused with flawed, three-dimensional characters, this first-rate collection strikes all the right chords in just the right places. Equal parts unnerving and heartrending, these chilling tales are testament to Currier’s literary prowess and the profound humanity at the core of his writing. Gay, straight, twisted like a pretzel…his writing is simply not to be missed by any reader with a taste for good fiction.”
Vince Liaguno, Dark Scribe Magazine

Still Dancing: New and Selected Stories by Jameson Currier

Still Dancing: New and Selected Stories by Jameson Currier, published by Lethe Press, brings together 20 of the author’s short stories about the impact of AIDS on the gay community which have been written over the last three decades. Along with ten stories from Currier’s debut collection Dancing on the Moon (1993), praised by The Village Voice as “defiant and elegiac,” are ten newly selected stories written by one of our preeminent masters of the short narrative form. And for this new collection the author has also chosen stories that revolve around gay New Yorkers—those lost, those surviving, those displaced, those undaunted, and those who became expatriates.

"In these stories, Currier fictionalizes queer life and times from three decades of the AIDS era, capturing the years in his prose. It has the literary heft of Camus and the quiet urbanity of Cheever…. Currier chronicles not only a defining era in gay America, but the private lives of the people who triumphed through what looked like defeat. These lives are often so finely drawn, Currier never has to resort to cliché… Gritty, esoteric, funny and passionate, Currier’s courageous prose reminds us that we must never forget."
Lewis Whittington, EDGE

QueerType

Sunday, May 01, 2005

For Your Leisure Reading

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