The Inside Reader: Keith Hale
Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends - Silas Weir Mitchell
Keith Hale is another one of those authors that surprised me. When I contacted this English university college professor, I was only sending out a message informing him his Clicking Beat on the Brink of Nada was one of the novels my friends in this moment were most talking about; I was not really expecting for him to reply and even less to agree to compile a list of his favorite books... but people can still surprise me, and I'm always in awe to the generosity of them. So please enjoy Keith Hale's Inside Reader List:
Here is my top ten:
1) Although little known in America, Michael Campbell's Lord, Dismiss Us created a sensation when it was published in England. The novel touched a nerve with almost any gay man who had ever had a schoolboy crush--and who hasn't? I fell in love with the characters, was captivated with the plot, and was surprised at how subtly hysterical the book can be. The writing is top-notch (it was published in the U.S. by the University of Chicago Press, which tells you something), and I have never read anything that appealed to me more.
Paperback: 384 pages
Publisher: University of Chicago Press (T) (April 1984)
ISBN-10: 0226092445
ISBN-13: 978-0226092447
Amazon: Lord, Dismiss Us
Lord Dismiss Us is a 1967 novel by Michael Campbell. Lord Dismiss Us is set in an English boys' public school. The novel deals with the love affair between two boys. Carleton, a bright sixth former loves Allen, a boy two years his junior. Carleton is very open about his feelings when speaking to Allen:"Oh, I do love you. I love you, my darling. Don't be shy, look at me. Do you love me?"
"Yes."
"Do you swear?"
"Yes."
The school is not only a hotbed of passion between other boys too. Ashley, one of the teachers, loves Carleton, and there is also a new headmaster who wants to root out moral corruption. The novel presents the issue of cross-generational sexual attraction and sexual abuse, or more aptly the abuse of power. Its true theme, however, is the nature of same-sex love and sex within the confines of an opposing moral establishment. It explores the conflict between the individual and his sense of right and the sense of right as determined by those in power. Campbell's notion of homosexual love may be over-romanticized and poetic, robbing it of lust, but that love is the focus of the novel. Lord Dismiss Us is a novel about right, not wrong, and virtue, not sin.
2) Generally, a book captures me if there is a depth of feeling to it and I fall in love with one or more of the characters. Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel has more depth to it than any book I've read, as well as characters I wanted to befriend. Too, the book's prose is so beautiful it frequently made me either gasp or cry. It's an uneven book, in need of editing, but when it's good, there's nothing better. The book has no gay theme but doesn't need one to appeal to gay readers. Eugene and his brothers are characterized so well it is impossible not to love them.
Paperback: 544 pages
Publisher: Scribner (October 10, 2006)
Publisher Link: http://books.simonandschuster.com/Look-Homeward-Angel/Thomas-Wolfe/9780743297318
ISBN-10: 0743297318
ISBN-13: 978-0743297318
Amazon: Look Homeward, Angel
The stunning, classic coming-of-age novel written by one of America's foremost Southern writers. A legendary author on par with William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Wolfe published Look Homeward, Angel, his first novel, about a young man's burning desire to leave his small town and tumultuous family in search of a better life, in 1929. It gave the world proof of his genius and launched a powerful legacy. The novel follows the trajectory of Eugene Gant, a brilliant and restless young man whose wanderlust and passion shape his adolescent years in rural North Carolina. Wolfe said that Look Homeward, Angel is "a book made out of my life," and his largely autobiographical story about the quest for a greater intellectual life has resonated with and influenced generations of readers, including some of today's most important novelists. Rich with lyrical prose and vivid characterizations, this twentieth-century American classic will capture the hearts and imaginations of every reader.
3) Andre Gide's The Counterfeiters is, in my opinion, his masterpiece. The tale of a young man's amorous relationship with his uncle and his platonic relationship with his best friend is written with style and grace, and the book also serves as something of a text on creative writing since Gide discusses the writing process throughout.
Paperback: 480 pages
Publisher: Vintage (June 12, 1973)
Publisher Link: http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780394718422
ISBN-10: 0394718429
ISBN-13: 978-0394718422
Amazon: The Counterfeiters
A young artist pursues a search for knowledge through the treatment of homosexuality and the collapse of morality in middle class France.
4) Thomas Hal Phillips died only a couple of years ago, leaving behind four beautiful novels, all with some degree of homoeroticism. His first novel, The Bitterweed Path, is the best, although his final novel, Red Midnight, comes close. For this list, I'll go with The Bitterweed Path because it was such a daring book to publish in the 1950s at the height of the McCarthy era. Wonderful characters, beautiful story, subtly told.
Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press (May 22, 1996)
Publisher Link: http://uncpress.unc.edu/browse/book_detail?title_id=68
ISBN-10: 0807845957
ISBN-13: 978-0807845950
Amazon: The Bitterweed Path
This long out-of-print and newly rediscovered novel tells the story of two boys growing up in the cotton country of Mississippi a generation after the Civil War. Originally published in 1950, the novel's unique contribution lies in its subtle engagement of homosexuality and cross-class love. In The Bitterweed Path, Thomas Hal Phillips vividly recreates rural Mississippi at the turn of the century. In elegant prose, he draws on the Old Testament story of David and Jonathan and writes of the friendship and love between two boys--one a sharecropper's son and the other the son of the landlord--and the complications that arise when the father of one of the boys falls in love with his son's friend. Part of a very small body of gay literature of the period, The Bitterweed Path does not sensationalize homosexual love but instead portrays sexuality as a continuum of human behavior. The result is a book that challenges many assumptions about gay representation in the first half of the twentieth century.
5) Hermann Hesse was my favorite writer when I was an adolescent. Beneath the Wheel, Demian, and Siddhartha were three of my four favorite novels (along with Gide's The Counterfeiters) for many years. I haven't re-read them in a while, but the place they have held in my imagination for almost my entire life makes them special to me. For this list, I am tempted to pick Siddhartha, since I used to regard it with almost religious devotion. Beneath the Wheel, however, was the book that made me cry, so it gets the spot on my list.
Paperback: 192 pages
Publisher: Picador (July 1, 2003)
Publisher Link: http://us.macmillan.com/beneaththewheel
ISBN-10: 031242230X
ISBN-13: 978-0312422301
Amazon: Beneath the Wheel
Hans Giebernath lives among the dull and respectable townsfolk of a sleepy Black Forest village. When he is discovered to be an exceptionally gifted student, the entire community presses him onto a path of serious scholarship. Hans dutifully follows the regimen of study and endless examinations, his success rewarded only with more crushing assignments. When Hans befriends a rebellious young poet, he begins to imagine other possibilities outside the narrowly circumscribed world of the academy. Finally sent home after a nervous breakdown, Hans is revived by nature and romance, and vows never to return to the gray conformity of the academic system.
6) Another writer that needs to be represented here is Mary Renault. Her novel The Charioteer made a huge impact on me, and I thoroughly enjoyed many of her books on ancient Greece. For this list, I'm including Fire from Heaven because it more than any other novel spurred my own interest in classical history and literature.
Paperback: 384 pages
Publisher: Vintage (June 11, 2002)
Publisher Link: http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780375726828
ISBN-10: 0375726829
ISBN-13: 978-0375726828
Amazon: Fire from Heaven
“Written with her usual vigor and imagination...Mary Renault has a great talent.”-The New York Times Book Review. Alexander’s beauty, strength, and defiance were apparent from birth, but his boyhood honed those gifts into the makings of a king. His mother, Olympias, and his father, King Philip of Macedon, fought each other for their son’s loyalty, teaching Alexander politics and vengeance from the cradle. His love for the youth Hephaistion taught him trust, while Aristotle’s tutoring provoked his mind and Homer’s Iliad fueled his aspirations. Killing his first man in battle at the age of twelve, he became regent at sixteen and commander of Macedon’s cavalry at eighteen, so that by the time his father was murdered, Alexander’s skills had grown to match his fiery ambition.
7) Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner is not a gay-themed novel, yet is more homoerotic than anything else I have read by the man who is arguably America's greatest writer. This is especially true near the end when Quentin and Shreve are laying in their beds and Faulkner keeps remarking on their naked, pink flesh. However, the book does not need homoeroticism to make my list: It is simply one of the most amazing books ever written.
Paperback: 378 pages
Publisher: McGraw-Hill; 1st edition (April 1, 1966)
Publisher Link: http://www.mhprofessional.com/product.php?search_crawl=true&isbn=0075536579
ISBN-10: 0075536579
ISBN-13: 978-0075536574
Amazon: Absalom, Absalom
Narrated by Quentin Compson, the suicide in "The Sound and the Fury", this is the tale of Thomas Sutpen, a poor White who dreams of founding a dynasty. His refusal to accept his wife's Negro blood initiates a bloody train of events to create a vision of doom of the American South.
8) Paul Russell is one of my favorite contemporary writers, and I consider War Against the Animals his masterpiece to date. I have read it a couple of times and loved it both times.
Paperback: 358 pages
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin (August 12, 2004)
Publisher Link: http://us.macmillan.com/waragainsttheanimals
ISBN-10: 0312335393
ISBN-13: 978-0312335397
Amazon: War Against the Animals
Widely praised for his deft prose and brilliant characterizations, Paul Russell has become increasingly regarded as one of the finest contemporary American novelists. Now, withWar Against the Animals, he returns with his richest, most accomplished, and most compelling work yet. Living in small town in upstate New York, middle-aged Cameron Barnes has, after almost dying, recently recovered a measure of health and is trying to find a way to reenter the world outside. As part of this, Cameron hires two local brothers in their early twenties, Jesse and Kyle, to renovate a barn on his property. Kyle sees an opportunity in Cameron, pushing his brother Jesse to befriend him and take advantage of Cameron's boredom and directionlessness. Caught between the opposing worlds embodied by Cameron and Kyle, Jesse is torn by the demands of his brother, the expectations of his family and community, and his own mix of volatile, contradictory emotions.
9) Bienvenido N. Santos is a Filipino author writing in English whose work should be internationally famous. The sympathy he shows his charecters reminds me a lot of Chekhov or Thomas Wolfe. His stories of life's exiles greatly move me. Scent of Apples, published in the U.S., is a beautiful collection of his short stories, and Santos, like Flannery O'Connor (another of my favorite writers) is at his best writing short fiction.
Paperback: 178 pages
Publisher: University of Washington Press; Paper edition edition (March 1997)
ISBN-10: 029595695X
ISBN-13: 978-0295956954
Amazon: Scent of Apples
"Santos writes simply and skillfully of his countrymen who leave home for America, of the pain of separation, lonliness, longing, yesterday's hopes and tomorrow's dreams. His portraits of these gentle, courageous exiles are moving as he shows how each struggles to make his roots while sustained by the dream of a return home...Santos gets to the heart of what it is like to be uprooted, alone, alien..." --Publishers Weekly "Santos is a writer of deceptive simplicity, one whose graceful storytelling conceals considerable political commitment...His stories capture with warmth and deep humanity the pain of exile and the cost of progress." --Washington Post "The whole collection is affecting--a small, unexpected gift from a writer with a welcome new voice." --Kirkus Reviews " Mr. Santos' best pieces are exquisitely crafted works which examine with irony, humor and humanity the plight of Filipinos in America." --Studies in Short Fiction
10) I'll conclude my top ten with Gary Reed's Pryor Rendering because I feel it is an overlooked novel that deserves wider readership. Charlie Hope is one of my favorite characters in gay literature.
Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: Plume (April 1, 1997)
ISBN-10: 0452277973
ISBN-13: 978-0452277977
Amazon: Pryor Rendering
A dazzling tale of one young man's emotional and sexual awakening in a small Oklahoma town--"colorful, rich . . . a near perfect tale, and a compelling alternative to the spate of gay epics that have lately inundated readers" (Kirkus Review).
About Keith Hale: Keith Hale, an English professor at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, has published three other books besides Clicking Beat on the Brink of Nada. He succeeded where many had failed when he convinced the Rupert Brooke Trust to allow him to edit a collection of the poet’s letters that had been sealed for eighty years due to their homosexual themes. That edition, Friends & Apostles, was published by Yale University Press. Hale also published a groundbreaking account of gay life in the Balkans--before the walls of Communism crumbled--in his travelogue titled In the Land of Alexander. The third book, Torn Allegiances, dealt with gays in the military. Hale has also published essays on Dickens, Rumi, Sa’di, Hafiz, and gay Philippine literature. He lists his hometowns as Mayflower and Little Rock, Arkansas, and Waco and Austin, Texas. After receiving his Ph.D. from Purdue, Hale taught at the University of Guam before moving to Wisconsin.
Clicking Beat on the Brink of Nada by Keith Hale
Paperback: 190 pages
Publisher: BookSurge Publishing (February 19, 2007)
ISBN-10: 141965991X
ISBN-13: 978-1419659911
Amazon: Clicking Beat on the Brink of Nada
By turns funny, romantic, erotic, and sad, this evocative novel brilliantly recreates the landscape of late adolescence, when friendships seem eternal and loves reincarnate. Set in Arkansas but first published in The Netherlands, Clicking Beat on the Brink of Nada quickly won praise from reviewers and readers across Europe and North America. The back cover blurb written by the late William S. Burroughs reads: "A haunting vision of young friendship shattered by an outrageously cruel world. Keith Hale's novel aches with adolescent first loves. It is tender, funny, and true." The book was published in the U.S. as Cody and remained on the amazon.com bestseller list for gay titles a year after it went out of print. Now Clicking Beat on the Brink of Nada is back in print with its original European front cover and title.
Keith Hale is another one of those authors that surprised me. When I contacted this English university college professor, I was only sending out a message informing him his Clicking Beat on the Brink of Nada was one of the novels my friends in this moment were most talking about; I was not really expecting for him to reply and even less to agree to compile a list of his favorite books... but people can still surprise me, and I'm always in awe to the generosity of them. So please enjoy Keith Hale's Inside Reader List:
Here is my top ten:
1) Although little known in America, Michael Campbell's Lord, Dismiss Us created a sensation when it was published in England. The novel touched a nerve with almost any gay man who had ever had a schoolboy crush--and who hasn't? I fell in love with the characters, was captivated with the plot, and was surprised at how subtly hysterical the book can be. The writing is top-notch (it was published in the U.S. by the University of Chicago Press, which tells you something), and I have never read anything that appealed to me more.
Paperback: 384 pages
Publisher: University of Chicago Press (T) (April 1984)
ISBN-10: 0226092445
ISBN-13: 978-0226092447
Amazon: Lord, Dismiss Us
Lord Dismiss Us is a 1967 novel by Michael Campbell. Lord Dismiss Us is set in an English boys' public school. The novel deals with the love affair between two boys. Carleton, a bright sixth former loves Allen, a boy two years his junior. Carleton is very open about his feelings when speaking to Allen:"Oh, I do love you. I love you, my darling. Don't be shy, look at me. Do you love me?"
"Yes."
"Do you swear?"
"Yes."
The school is not only a hotbed of passion between other boys too. Ashley, one of the teachers, loves Carleton, and there is also a new headmaster who wants to root out moral corruption. The novel presents the issue of cross-generational sexual attraction and sexual abuse, or more aptly the abuse of power. Its true theme, however, is the nature of same-sex love and sex within the confines of an opposing moral establishment. It explores the conflict between the individual and his sense of right and the sense of right as determined by those in power. Campbell's notion of homosexual love may be over-romanticized and poetic, robbing it of lust, but that love is the focus of the novel. Lord Dismiss Us is a novel about right, not wrong, and virtue, not sin.
2) Generally, a book captures me if there is a depth of feeling to it and I fall in love with one or more of the characters. Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel has more depth to it than any book I've read, as well as characters I wanted to befriend. Too, the book's prose is so beautiful it frequently made me either gasp or cry. It's an uneven book, in need of editing, but when it's good, there's nothing better. The book has no gay theme but doesn't need one to appeal to gay readers. Eugene and his brothers are characterized so well it is impossible not to love them.
Paperback: 544 pages
Publisher: Scribner (October 10, 2006)
Publisher Link: http://books.simonandschuster.com/Look-Homeward-Angel/Thomas-Wolfe/9780743297318
ISBN-10: 0743297318
ISBN-13: 978-0743297318
Amazon: Look Homeward, Angel
The stunning, classic coming-of-age novel written by one of America's foremost Southern writers. A legendary author on par with William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Wolfe published Look Homeward, Angel, his first novel, about a young man's burning desire to leave his small town and tumultuous family in search of a better life, in 1929. It gave the world proof of his genius and launched a powerful legacy. The novel follows the trajectory of Eugene Gant, a brilliant and restless young man whose wanderlust and passion shape his adolescent years in rural North Carolina. Wolfe said that Look Homeward, Angel is "a book made out of my life," and his largely autobiographical story about the quest for a greater intellectual life has resonated with and influenced generations of readers, including some of today's most important novelists. Rich with lyrical prose and vivid characterizations, this twentieth-century American classic will capture the hearts and imaginations of every reader.
3) Andre Gide's The Counterfeiters is, in my opinion, his masterpiece. The tale of a young man's amorous relationship with his uncle and his platonic relationship with his best friend is written with style and grace, and the book also serves as something of a text on creative writing since Gide discusses the writing process throughout.
Paperback: 480 pages
Publisher: Vintage (June 12, 1973)
Publisher Link: http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780394718422
ISBN-10: 0394718429
ISBN-13: 978-0394718422
Amazon: The Counterfeiters
A young artist pursues a search for knowledge through the treatment of homosexuality and the collapse of morality in middle class France.
4) Thomas Hal Phillips died only a couple of years ago, leaving behind four beautiful novels, all with some degree of homoeroticism. His first novel, The Bitterweed Path, is the best, although his final novel, Red Midnight, comes close. For this list, I'll go with The Bitterweed Path because it was such a daring book to publish in the 1950s at the height of the McCarthy era. Wonderful characters, beautiful story, subtly told.
Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press (May 22, 1996)
Publisher Link: http://uncpress.unc.edu/browse/book_detail?title_id=68
ISBN-10: 0807845957
ISBN-13: 978-0807845950
Amazon: The Bitterweed Path
This long out-of-print and newly rediscovered novel tells the story of two boys growing up in the cotton country of Mississippi a generation after the Civil War. Originally published in 1950, the novel's unique contribution lies in its subtle engagement of homosexuality and cross-class love. In The Bitterweed Path, Thomas Hal Phillips vividly recreates rural Mississippi at the turn of the century. In elegant prose, he draws on the Old Testament story of David and Jonathan and writes of the friendship and love between two boys--one a sharecropper's son and the other the son of the landlord--and the complications that arise when the father of one of the boys falls in love with his son's friend. Part of a very small body of gay literature of the period, The Bitterweed Path does not sensationalize homosexual love but instead portrays sexuality as a continuum of human behavior. The result is a book that challenges many assumptions about gay representation in the first half of the twentieth century.
5) Hermann Hesse was my favorite writer when I was an adolescent. Beneath the Wheel, Demian, and Siddhartha were three of my four favorite novels (along with Gide's The Counterfeiters) for many years. I haven't re-read them in a while, but the place they have held in my imagination for almost my entire life makes them special to me. For this list, I am tempted to pick Siddhartha, since I used to regard it with almost religious devotion. Beneath the Wheel, however, was the book that made me cry, so it gets the spot on my list.
Paperback: 192 pages
Publisher: Picador (July 1, 2003)
Publisher Link: http://us.macmillan.com/beneaththewheel
ISBN-10: 031242230X
ISBN-13: 978-0312422301
Amazon: Beneath the Wheel
Hans Giebernath lives among the dull and respectable townsfolk of a sleepy Black Forest village. When he is discovered to be an exceptionally gifted student, the entire community presses him onto a path of serious scholarship. Hans dutifully follows the regimen of study and endless examinations, his success rewarded only with more crushing assignments. When Hans befriends a rebellious young poet, he begins to imagine other possibilities outside the narrowly circumscribed world of the academy. Finally sent home after a nervous breakdown, Hans is revived by nature and romance, and vows never to return to the gray conformity of the academic system.
6) Another writer that needs to be represented here is Mary Renault. Her novel The Charioteer made a huge impact on me, and I thoroughly enjoyed many of her books on ancient Greece. For this list, I'm including Fire from Heaven because it more than any other novel spurred my own interest in classical history and literature.
Paperback: 384 pages
Publisher: Vintage (June 11, 2002)
Publisher Link: http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780375726828
ISBN-10: 0375726829
ISBN-13: 978-0375726828
Amazon: Fire from Heaven
“Written with her usual vigor and imagination...Mary Renault has a great talent.”-The New York Times Book Review. Alexander’s beauty, strength, and defiance were apparent from birth, but his boyhood honed those gifts into the makings of a king. His mother, Olympias, and his father, King Philip of Macedon, fought each other for their son’s loyalty, teaching Alexander politics and vengeance from the cradle. His love for the youth Hephaistion taught him trust, while Aristotle’s tutoring provoked his mind and Homer’s Iliad fueled his aspirations. Killing his first man in battle at the age of twelve, he became regent at sixteen and commander of Macedon’s cavalry at eighteen, so that by the time his father was murdered, Alexander’s skills had grown to match his fiery ambition.
7) Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner is not a gay-themed novel, yet is more homoerotic than anything else I have read by the man who is arguably America's greatest writer. This is especially true near the end when Quentin and Shreve are laying in their beds and Faulkner keeps remarking on their naked, pink flesh. However, the book does not need homoeroticism to make my list: It is simply one of the most amazing books ever written.
Paperback: 378 pages
Publisher: McGraw-Hill; 1st edition (April 1, 1966)
Publisher Link: http://www.mhprofessional.com/product.php?search_crawl=true&isbn=0075536579
ISBN-10: 0075536579
ISBN-13: 978-0075536574
Amazon: Absalom, Absalom
Narrated by Quentin Compson, the suicide in "The Sound and the Fury", this is the tale of Thomas Sutpen, a poor White who dreams of founding a dynasty. His refusal to accept his wife's Negro blood initiates a bloody train of events to create a vision of doom of the American South.
8) Paul Russell is one of my favorite contemporary writers, and I consider War Against the Animals his masterpiece to date. I have read it a couple of times and loved it both times.
Paperback: 358 pages
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin (August 12, 2004)
Publisher Link: http://us.macmillan.com/waragainsttheanimals
ISBN-10: 0312335393
ISBN-13: 978-0312335397
Amazon: War Against the Animals
Widely praised for his deft prose and brilliant characterizations, Paul Russell has become increasingly regarded as one of the finest contemporary American novelists. Now, withWar Against the Animals, he returns with his richest, most accomplished, and most compelling work yet. Living in small town in upstate New York, middle-aged Cameron Barnes has, after almost dying, recently recovered a measure of health and is trying to find a way to reenter the world outside. As part of this, Cameron hires two local brothers in their early twenties, Jesse and Kyle, to renovate a barn on his property. Kyle sees an opportunity in Cameron, pushing his brother Jesse to befriend him and take advantage of Cameron's boredom and directionlessness. Caught between the opposing worlds embodied by Cameron and Kyle, Jesse is torn by the demands of his brother, the expectations of his family and community, and his own mix of volatile, contradictory emotions.
9) Bienvenido N. Santos is a Filipino author writing in English whose work should be internationally famous. The sympathy he shows his charecters reminds me a lot of Chekhov or Thomas Wolfe. His stories of life's exiles greatly move me. Scent of Apples, published in the U.S., is a beautiful collection of his short stories, and Santos, like Flannery O'Connor (another of my favorite writers) is at his best writing short fiction.
Paperback: 178 pages
Publisher: University of Washington Press; Paper edition edition (March 1997)
ISBN-10: 029595695X
ISBN-13: 978-0295956954
Amazon: Scent of Apples
"Santos writes simply and skillfully of his countrymen who leave home for America, of the pain of separation, lonliness, longing, yesterday's hopes and tomorrow's dreams. His portraits of these gentle, courageous exiles are moving as he shows how each struggles to make his roots while sustained by the dream of a return home...Santos gets to the heart of what it is like to be uprooted, alone, alien..." --Publishers Weekly "Santos is a writer of deceptive simplicity, one whose graceful storytelling conceals considerable political commitment...His stories capture with warmth and deep humanity the pain of exile and the cost of progress." --Washington Post "The whole collection is affecting--a small, unexpected gift from a writer with a welcome new voice." --Kirkus Reviews " Mr. Santos' best pieces are exquisitely crafted works which examine with irony, humor and humanity the plight of Filipinos in America." --Studies in Short Fiction
10) I'll conclude my top ten with Gary Reed's Pryor Rendering because I feel it is an overlooked novel that deserves wider readership. Charlie Hope is one of my favorite characters in gay literature.
Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: Plume (April 1, 1997)
ISBN-10: 0452277973
ISBN-13: 978-0452277977
Amazon: Pryor Rendering
A dazzling tale of one young man's emotional and sexual awakening in a small Oklahoma town--"colorful, rich . . . a near perfect tale, and a compelling alternative to the spate of gay epics that have lately inundated readers" (Kirkus Review).
About Keith Hale: Keith Hale, an English professor at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, has published three other books besides Clicking Beat on the Brink of Nada. He succeeded where many had failed when he convinced the Rupert Brooke Trust to allow him to edit a collection of the poet’s letters that had been sealed for eighty years due to their homosexual themes. That edition, Friends & Apostles, was published by Yale University Press. Hale also published a groundbreaking account of gay life in the Balkans--before the walls of Communism crumbled--in his travelogue titled In the Land of Alexander. The third book, Torn Allegiances, dealt with gays in the military. Hale has also published essays on Dickens, Rumi, Sa’di, Hafiz, and gay Philippine literature. He lists his hometowns as Mayflower and Little Rock, Arkansas, and Waco and Austin, Texas. After receiving his Ph.D. from Purdue, Hale taught at the University of Guam before moving to Wisconsin.
Clicking Beat on the Brink of Nada by Keith Hale
Paperback: 190 pages
Publisher: BookSurge Publishing (February 19, 2007)
ISBN-10: 141965991X
ISBN-13: 978-1419659911
Amazon: Clicking Beat on the Brink of Nada
By turns funny, romantic, erotic, and sad, this evocative novel brilliantly recreates the landscape of late adolescence, when friendships seem eternal and loves reincarnate. Set in Arkansas but first published in The Netherlands, Clicking Beat on the Brink of Nada quickly won praise from reviewers and readers across Europe and North America. The back cover blurb written by the late William S. Burroughs reads: "A haunting vision of young friendship shattered by an outrageously cruel world. Keith Hale's novel aches with adolescent first loves. It is tender, funny, and true." The book was published in the U.S. as Cody and remained on the amazon.com bestseller list for gay titles a year after it went out of print. Now Clicking Beat on the Brink of Nada is back in print with its original European front cover and title.