Faggots

Larry Kramer

ISBN 10: 0394410955 / ISBN 13: 9780394410951

Published by Random House, 1978

About this Item

Octavo, 24 cm x 16 cm, 304 pp. There is some toning on the spine causing fading but the back and front cover are still yellow. There is a scuff on the back cover on the bottom right of the dust jacket. There is small tear on the top of the spine and has some wrinkling on the top of the dust jacket. There is some minor wear on the bottom of the spine of the book.

Seller Inventory # 90287

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Faggots
• Publisher: Random House
• Publication Date: 1978
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0394410955
• ISBN 13: 9780394410951
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Literature/Fiction

About this title

Synopsis

Larry Kramer's Faggots has been in print since its original publication in 1978 and has become one of the best-selling novels about gay life ever written. The book is a fierce satire of the gay ghetto and a touching story of one man's desperate search for love there, and reading it today is a fascinating look at how much, and how little, has changed.

Review

Very few writers have the prescience or audacity to produce one of the standard works of their era--not a classic, necessarily, but a book that defines its own cultural moment in startling new terms, like One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest or Portnoy's Complaint. Activist and rabble-rouser Larry Kramer has the distinction of having written not only one of the earliest and best-known plays on AIDS, The Normal Heart, but also the astonishing satire of gay urban sexual mores Faggots, perhaps the most reviled novel in the gay literary canon. A grim, graphic expansion on John Rechy's Numbers, which chronicled a hustler's soulless game of sexual conquest, Kramer's pornopticon turns off many readers by about page 3, when its hero, the screenwriter Fred Lemish, is offered an array of dubious pleasures in a private room at the infamous Everard Baths in New York. What Lemish really wants, of course, is true love, preferably from his elusive boyfriend, Dinky Adams. But as long as he's in the room...

Celebrated and excoriated when it first appeared in 1978, this reprint of a gay anticlassic is not for the faint of heart. For the rest of us, it is a harsh, fascinating, and somewhat eerie revisitation of the carnal excesses of a generation that couldn't hear the bell tolling over the disco beat.