Vital Signs: Essential AIDS Fiction

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0786720093 ISBN 13: 9780786720095

Publisher: Carroll & Graf Publishers Inc, 2007

Since first reports of a "gay cancer" in 1981, it has been hard to ignore the politics, polemic, and prejudice that gathered around AIDS. Yet a literary genre also emerged, and Vital Signs contains the very best of the extraordinary work created in America in response to our greatest contemporary health crisis. This collection documents the critical years of struggle, bravery, loss, and redemption in eighteen unique examples. Inventive, moving, humane, and uplifting, these stories show us how to live in times of uncertainty and adversity. They offer, indeed, a plethora of vital signs.

About the Author:

Richard Canning is the editor of Between Men: Original Fiction by Today's Best Gay Writers and author of Gay Fiction Speaks: Conversations with Gay Novelists and Hear Us Out: Conversations with Gay Novelists, which won the 2005 Editors Choice Award of the Lambda Literary Organization. He was born in England and divides his time between London and Sheffield, where he teaches British and American literature at University. He is preparing a third, and final volume of conversations with gay novelists. Over the past five years, he has been writing a critical biography of the 1920s English novelist Ronald Firbank, due 2007. He has written for many newspapers, magazines and journals, including The Guardian, The Independent, The Los Angeles Times, The James White Review, Attitude, and Out. Series editor Dale Peck was born on Long Island and is the author of several novels, a collection of short stories, and a family memoir. His short fiction has appeared in Artforum, BOMB, The London Review of Books, The New Republic, The New York Times, and The Village Voice. He also teaches creative writing and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1995.