Mark Merlis is one of my favorite contemporary novelists. I will read anything he writes. I’ve been reading him passionately ever since his first novel, American Studies, came out in 1994. Reeve, an older gay man hospitalized after a gay bashing, remembers his difficult friendship with a famous English teacher of the 1950s. Sentence by sentence, it was the most beautifully written first novel I’d ever read; the prose took one deep into the gay world of another era. Merlis followed that with something very different: An Arrow’s Flight, in which he ingeniously mixes the Philoctetes story from ancient Greece with New York gay life in the age of AIDS. We get gods and goddesses, aircraft carriers and archaic armor, high priests and go-go boys. It begins as a stunt and a comic tour de force, but gains real emotional weight and power as it progresses. His next novel was the very real, very personal Man About Town, the humorous story of a middle-aged bureaucrat hunting for the model from the swimsuit ad that first made him aware of his sexuality when he was a teenager. It’s really the tale of a man looking for his youth, but also an exploration of how much the gay experience has changed in fifty years. - See more at: http://www.lambdaliterary.org/features/03/16/mark-merlis-on-his-new-novel-jd-his-writing-process-and-the-autobiographical-details-in-his-work/#sthash.Aj6jn1Eh.dpuf
