Product Description

This collection of stories about gay men aim to shed light on the role of the outsider in a society obsessed with beauty and sex. Klein's protagonists have acne, they have club feet, they are drag queens, and in some cases, they have AIDS.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1675226 in Books
• Published on: 2000-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 200 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Taken separately, the short stories in this debut collection are brief slices of bitterness. Taken together, they describe a gay coming of age and a coming to grips with human frailty. In the first story, the physical manifestation is genetic: the club foot the narrator inherited from his mother. After a party at which his guests dress up in his mother's clothing and makeup, his parents discover his sexual preference. "All I wanted was for you to have a chance at a normal life," his mother says. "It's like you've chosen to be deformed." In the title story, the narrator recounts the parallel tales of his painful acne treatment and the doomed affair between a friend (a member of "the secret club of beautiful men") and a married man. By "Dr. K.," though, the body's betrayal is fatal: with the narrator's lover dying, he begins an affair with a man whose lover has killed himself. After inquiring about the lover, he adds apologetically that "Storytelling... is what people do during the plague-they hole up somewhere and have a round table." Klein's evocation of both an individual and a culture maturing and entering a funereal phase is strong, and although there are weak patches here and there when imagery gets in the way of meaning-especially in "India," which stumbles pointlessly about-his direct, economical language hammers these stories home with a single stroke.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Klein's strong stories limn the lives of people living on the fringes: gawky adolescent boys struggling with problem skin and inexplicable urges toward other boys; a teenager born clubfooted whose deformity bonds him to his seductive, guilt-instilling mother; a recovering junkie whose HIV-negative status makes him stand out from those around him, who all seem to be HIV infected. In the longest story, "India," we meet a young man dying of AIDS who seems an outsider even to his lover's life and death. After seeing that his lover's body is cremated, though, he journeys to India, where he must be dependent on the kindness of strangers as he hovers, not quite dying, on the fringes of death. A strong addition to gay and lesbian literature. Whitney Scott

Review
What little "medicine" is available in this debut collection is not only painful for the embattled characters, but it throws into painful relief the displaced moods and passions of the gay psyche as it confronts the end of the century. In a severe, disciplined, brooding style that presses each of his six stories toward a harsh and elliptical conclusion, Klein (1979 winner of the Academy of American Poets Prize) details the struggles of his small tribe of loosely tethered characters - most of them starved for some kind of emotional fix. "Club Feet" establishes the basic tenor: Each of the gay men who functions as a pivot for an individual narrative will suffer a physical malady either altering his self-image or threatening his life. In "Club Feet," the narrator finds in his deformed foot an inescapable connection with his similarly disabled mother. In "Undertow," an adolescent infatuation with a straight relative leads to rape and victimization, with detours through theft and voyeurism. The title story explores Klein's central obsession, the rending tension that links beauty and ugliness: Scarred by cystic acne, the narrator nonetheless manages to devise an attitude toward his malady that lets him function both as foil to and confidant of Lawrence, a striking painter with a troubling taste for older men. "Keloid" and "Dr. K." are weaker tales, though explicitly addressing the lurking specter of AIDS, for which the only medicine is hope. The last piece, "India," summarizes in novella form the plangent chiaroscuro that characterizes the author's style: After his lover's death, the narrator, himself stricken with AIDS, takes a feverish trip to India and wanders among an unlikely gaggle of locals and expatriates, allowing the rich experience of travel in a strange land to shape his final days. Harrowing, and yet exquisite, unflinching, and compelling. (Kirkus Reviews)

Customer Reviews

Dark but engrossing
Nice style and well written. I read this a while ago but it stayed with me.

Read this. It is good.
Klein sure knows how to dance, but with words, baby. With words. I enjoyed this read. It has guts, swings along and then hits you like a half baked pie --- pow. Like a weeping monkey in the garden, or a squealing cat in the laundry. Sad, yes. Wounded, hounded and powerful fiction, oh double yes.
If you like JT Leroy, this book will make you happy.

A bit depressing but nicely written
I read a used copy of this book. The author deals with pain...the pain of recognizing and claiming one's sexual identity and the pain of living life until death. The stories are nicely written with great description and expression of feeling.