In the City of Shy Hunters: A Novel - Hardcover

Spanbauer, Tom

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802116914 ISBN 13: 9780802116918

Publisher: Grove Pr, 2001

Synopsis

In the City of Shy Hunters opens in 1983, when William Parker moves from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to Manhattan, desperate to escape the provincialism of the small Western towns in which he has spent his entire life. Shy, afflicted with a stutter, and struggling with his sexuality, Will has been afraid of New York his entire life. In moving there, he learns the value of embracing one's fears, finding himself surrounded for the first time by people who understand and celebrate his quirks and flaws. Along the way, he becomes wrapped up in one of the most unforgettable romances in literature, a love affair with a volatile, six-foot-five African-American drag queen and performance artist named Rose.
But even as he is falling in love with Rose and growing into himself, Will must watch as his friends are taken from him as AIDS grows from a rumor into a full-scale epidemic. Meanwhile, tension is also mounting between the police and the squatters in his local park - until a vicious riot breaks out, providing Will with the opportunity for a heroic, transcendent act that will repay the city for all it has taught him and leave readers shaken, fulfilled, and changed.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

An expertly drawn, starkly authentic, early-1980s Manhattan provides the setting for this sprawling novel by Spanbauer (The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon). It tells the story of Will Parker, a young man from Jackson Hole, Wyo., who comes to the "Wolf Swamp" of New York in search of his boyhood first love, Charlie. After Will secures a seedy apartment, a bevy of tough, typecast but blissfully genuine New Yorkers immediately materialize. Among them are drug-addled Ruby and her Indian sidekick, True Shot; Fiona, the tenacious waitress who robustly trains Will at his new restaurant job; and "Shakespearean drag queen" and upstairs neighbor Rose, with whom he falls in love. But while dramatic temperaments and sequined wardrobes are being sorted out, AIDS, gay fiction's great leveler, has already begun claiming victims. Spanbauer's rapid-fire narration and clipped sentences generate a surprising amount of tension and gritty emotion, as does his vibrant, dead-on dialogue and keen sense of place. The high points come along the trajectory of Will's awakening sense of self, first when Rose drags him to his first Gay Pride parade and then, as years pass and the plague intensifies, when he witnesses the sudden death of friends. This is a big, brazen, histrionic work of fiction, one that pays respectable, if unsentimental, homage to a devastating period in gay history. However, the overstuffed plot crammed with a swirling pageant of madcap characters (even a dance-floor cameo by Elizabeth Taylor) and a brewing imbroglio concerning squatters rights may exhaust readers before the epic tome reaches maximum velocity. (June)Forecast: Spanbauer fans will expect a more cohesive effort, but this is a fitting opus for Gay Pride Month. The book's striking turquoise cover art and Spanbauer's name in red will attract readers' attention, as will a 14-city author tour.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* Spanbauer's pansexual period piece about a half-breed in an Idaho whorehouse, The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon (1992), won him a delighted readership that has been awaiting a follow-up. He shifts setting to the Big Apple in the mid-'80s, when shy, stuttering Will Parker arrives from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, searching for his lost love. For the first time in his life, Will is surrounded by equally quirky people. Finding a niche among them, he learns to accept himself. He falls for a six-foot-five black drag-queen-slash-performance-artist just as AIDS becomes epidemic. Spanbauer's long meditation on love and loss proves mesmerizing, carrying readers backward and forward in time, often in chantlike, repetitive passages lacking conventional punctuation. When Will's Native American friend sees an Indian exhibit in a museum, "pretty soon True Shot was sobbing way loud and his chin moving funny and he was weeping weeping and you could hear his weeping all over inside the halls of the Museum of Unnatural History. . . . I put my arm around True Shot's extra lovely shoulders. . . . his whole big extra lovely belly bouncing and chest up and down up and down . . . True Shot made his extra lovely hands into fists." This extra lovely novel should enchant Spanbauer's fans and win him more. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Pr
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0802116914
• ISBN 13: 9780802116918
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 504