User

A Queer Classic re-published for the first time in 27 years, by the author of The Romanian, winner of the Prix de France.

A New York City hustler with a special gift for reeling in customers, Apollo, "a pale skinned mulatto with a mournful mouth" strips at a gay sex theater in Times Square. He is one of the most seductive and disturbing creations in recent American fiction.

Unflinchingly describing the lives of hustlers, pimps, drug-addicts and transsexuals in 1990s Times Square, User speaks with the authentic voice of characters from the edge. This is a world filled with stark, hypnotic eroticism and mined with terrors peculiar to the subterranean city in the hours after midnight.

Bruce Benderson is a novelist, essayist, journalist and translator who lives in New York. He has taught creative writing, urban culture and French literature at Deep Springs College, Nevada and lectured at Brown, Evergreen and Sarah Lawrence. He is bilingual and his work is hugely popular in France.