The Same Embrace

Two identical twins, one a gay activist in Boston, the other an Orthodox Jewish student in Jerusalem, attempt to overcome their estrangement, confronting such issues as AIDS, assimilation, and sexual identity

Michael Lowenthal was born in 1969 in Washington, D.C., and was raised mostly in the city's northwestern suburb of Chevy Chase, Maryland, in a Conservative Jewish household. He attended Dartmouth College, where he double majored in Creative Writing and Comparative Religion, and from which he graduated in 1990 as his class valedictorian.

After a six-month stint of washing dishes and tending bar, he began working for University Press of New England, where he eventually founded the Hardscrabble Books imprint, publishing such writers as Chris Bohjalian, W. D. Wetherell, and Ernest Hebert.

In 1993 he began his career as a full-time writer and freelance editor. He received a 1995-96 New Hampshire State Council on the Arts Fellowship for fiction writing, based on the first chapter of THE SAME EMBRACE. He has also edited a number of books, including GAY MEN AT THE MILLENNIUM (Tarcher/Putnam), FLESH AND THE WORD 4 (Plume), and the forthcoming FLESH AND THE WORD 5 (Plume).

His short stories and essays have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The New York Times Magazine, Other Voices, The Crescent Review, Columbia, and Yellow Silk, and have been anthologized in more than a dozen books, including BEST AMERICAN GAY FICTION (Little, Brown), MEN ON MEN 5 (Plume), WRESTLING WITH THE ANGEL (Riverhead), SISTER AND BROTHER (Harper San Francisco), and two volumes of Susie Bright's BEST AMERICAN EROTICA (Touchstone).

His journalism and reviews have been published in dozens of periodicals, including The New York Times Book Review, The Boston Globe, Washington Post Book World, The Boston Phoenix, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, Out Magazine, The Advocate, and Genre.

Lowenthal currently lives in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston.