Distortion (Gay Men's Fiction) [Paperback]

Stephen Beachy (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1560239999 | ISBN-13: 978-1560239994 | Publication Date: January 1, 2001

Fiction. Gay/Lesbian Studies. New to SPD. After exchanging his least favorite sexual act for ticket money, a young hustler named Reggie (gay, racially mixed, and currently flat broke) finds himself crossing the desert on a Greyhound bus. Unfortunately, Reggie is on speed and believes that sinister cosmic forces are in play and that they're focused on him. Even worse, he may be right. DISTORTION follows Reggie's dark journey from indigent hustler to MTV star and back, across the country and through the twists of his own mind and the minds of the equally dysfunctional people who know him. I like you you were great I mean I really love you I gotta go...

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Beachy's triumph of prose, hypnotic and lyrical, bathes his characters in the revealing light of a photographer's eye. [His] haunting imagery illuminates the dignity and tenderness of a generation disenfranchised from love, from healing and from hope. His empathic but unsparing vision of the inhabitants of a littered landscape where race, religion and identity are connected by lust is AN ARTISTIC AND LITERARY ACHIEVEMENT." - Jay Quinn "Even though I tend to distrust gushing, overstated blurbs on the backs of books, I swear to god, Stephen Beachy's Distortion is the most disturbing, thrilling, fragile, daring, explosive, miraculous book I've read in months and months and months. Stephen Beachy is a complete visionary, a sorcerer, a secret weapon... READ THIS BOOK. Read it, and gasp, marvel, rage, weep and applaud" - Scott Heim

About the Author

Stephen Beachy is a writer. He was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1965. His first novel, The Whistling Song, was published by W. W. Norton with cover illustrations by Curt Kirkwood in 1991 and his second, Distortion, by Harrington Park Press, in 2000. Two novellas, Some Phantom and No Time Flat are forthcoming in 2006, from Suspect Thoughts Press. His fiction has been published in BOMB, Chicago Review, Blithe House Quarterly, SHADE, and various anthologies. He has written literary criticism for the San Francisco Bay Guardian. In October, 2005, he published an article in New York Magazine, exposing the writer JT LeRoy as the concoction of a woman named Laura Albert, with the help of her family members. Beachy teaches in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco. Beachy is also a second cousin of biologist Philip Beachy and historian Robert Beachy.

Product Details

• Paperback: 318 pages
• Publisher: Southern Tier Editions/Haworth Press (January 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560239999
• ISBN-13: 978-1560239994
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,236,480 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beachy does it again, November 22, 2000

By 

Thomas Janowski "tomj1963" (Rochester, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Distortion (Gay Men's Fiction) (Paperback)

Having loved Beachy's The Whistling Song, I impatiently waited for his next novel.....

Distortion is the perfect title for his latest book. Like all the interference from outside sources that invade our lives, Beachy tells a brutally honest and disturbing story. Beachy is a master of words. Every passage, every paragraph is a detailed and descriptive journey. The story itself is told in a dream-like or drug induced tale. It's a modern day 'On The Road' of the soul. Though the reading is complicated because of rich detail and sudden turns, the words connect with me so deeply.

I will read and reread this novel many times to capture its true depth and will probably discover something new with each reading.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars is this realism?, October 2, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Distortion (Gay Men's Fiction) (Library Binding)

This book is very lifelike, in the sense that life is grand and tragic and bursting with unexpected details, full of missed chances, frequently an unexpected hoot. As in life, the story goes trailing cosmic debris -- a San Francisco driver drawn off course by the seductive disembodiment of fog, an afterlife no more organized than this one, and the odd deus ex machina back from the dead. Also very lifelike are the sheer volume of things and tangents and the disconnect between intention and result. Characters bent on murder, rape and various kinds of exploitation wind up doing relative good, while others wreak destruction trying to love or save or bless. There are moral jury-hangers like the guy seduced by his son who dumps him in a hotel room and runs. There are charming moments like the one before a plane crash when a little boy swallows a hatchling snake to protect it, then remembers the causticity of the stomach and takes up its brother elsewise. Johns, relatives, exploiters and passing weird strangers come and go, a wedding cake explodes, a team of mermaids seek the black box of a fallen airplane. The reader wanders in the full illusion of freedom from scene to scene and mind to mind through a series of stream-of-consciousness narrations by highly disparate characters. In addition to the young hustler protagonist and the woman drawn to fog, we hear from a pair of young women struggling to manage the mentally disabled children in a typically underfunded home, the boy fond of snakes and guiltily fantasizing fellow passengers, and an indie film nebbish addicted to pointless immortalization of this or that "complex, fascinating" derriere. Speaking of which, this book gives a variant meaning to the phrase cum laude, perhaps not new. Scholars of the genre may find a great deal of learned discourse in the book. If you're stuck for a lit class paper, try the men's johns as zonae epiphanae or see what you can make of the novel as a depiction of God's brain by elaborating the metaphor "a dendritic line of ants."

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars brief summary, September 24, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Distortion (Gay Men's Fiction) (Paperback)

If Dante Alighieri and James Joyce were to caroom through the seven circles of L.A. in a Greyhound bus, pursued by a bevy of graduate-student imps condemned to retranslate "Notes from Underground" into ever more modern English, the result might be this book.