Plays Well with Others - Softcover

Gurganus, Allan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571193870 ISBN 13: 9780571193875

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2005

Synopsis

Written with erotic candour and wild comic energy, Plays Well with Others is an essential fable of our time, the long-awaited great novel of the AIDS pandemic. Hartley Mims arrives in New York in 1980 to embark on an artistic career and establish a brilliant circle of friends. He succeeds at least in gathering a ragtag band of artists - sexually venturesome, gifted, ambitious, and hungry. His circle faces muggings, bad reviews, and the even greater dangers of each other's boundless, toxic ardour. Just as the group is becoming artistically notorious, an unaccountable disease makes its own career move among them. How such colourful egoistic pals close ranks and nurse each other provides the afterword to one long, good, yet interrupted party. The circle's greatest art becomes that most unlikely of human masterpieces: utopian community.

About this title

Review:

"A wondrous book..brimming with life.... ÝIt¨ confirms Gurganus's stature as one of our most significant and indispensable writers." --Atlanta Journal & Constitution
"Gurganus, a storyteller in the grand tradition, can tell his stories as well as anyone alive." --The New York Times
"Witty and piercing. There are sentences that glisten like black opals." --Los Angeles Times

"A wondrous book..brimming with life.... [It] confirms Gurganus's stature as one of our most significant and indispensable writers." --Atlanta Journal & Constitution

"Gurganus, a storyteller in the grand tradition, can tell his stories as well as anyone alive." --The New York Times

"Witty and piercing. There are sentences that glisten like black opals." --Los Angeles Times

From the Back Cover:

Plays Well with Others chronicles a ragtag group of gifted kids who come to seek their fortunes; they find the low-paying joys of making art and the heady education only multiple erotic partners can provide. Having mythologized each other through the boom years, having commenced becoming "names", they suddenly encounter a brand-new disease like something out of fifth-rate sci-fi. Friends are soon questioning how much they really owe each other; they're left with the ancient consolation of one another's company and help. We watch this egotistic circle forge its single greatest masterwork: a healthy community.

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0571193870
• ISBN 13: 9780571193875
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336