Waves: An Anthology of New Gay Literature [Paperback]

Ethan Mordden (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 31, 1994

Avant-garde photographers and closeted cops. Sexual buccaneers and yearning celibates. Dutiful uncles and embittered sons. Healthy men who live in terror of getting sick. Sick men who find that their debility suddenly makes them fearless.

What unites the characters in this triumphantly outspoken anthology is a sexual orientation that has made them outsiders in contemporary America. What unites the fourteen stories that Ethan Mordden -- himself one of our best-known gay writers -- has collected here is an outsider's acuity of vision, a gaze that deconstructs the straight world even as it explores the landscape of sexual otherness.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

With an ever-increasing number of anthologized gay writing, each collection must convincingly define some sort of mission to justify its reason for being. In his lengthy introduction, Mordden purports to have uncovered the vanguard of new gay male writers and baptizes them the "Third Wave" (that is, following the Seventies' Violet Quill aesthetes and Eighties AIDS realists). While some of the individual pieces contain pertinent and solid writing (notably those by Jon Weir, Richard Davis, Scott Heim, and Jim Provenzano), Mordden's uneven selections, which include also-ran magazine pieces and a chapter from a successful 1990 novel (Michael Cunningham's A Home at the End of the World, LJ 10/15/90), do not deliver his desired "sense of urgency." Discontents (LJ 5/15/92) better revealed the experimental fringes of contemporary gay writing, and Mordden's essential literary objective-the clarification of "the gay condition for gay readers"-has been better realized in the ongoing "Men on Men" series from Dutton. By comparison, this collection amounts to merely a ripple.
Douglas McClemont, New York
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

These 14 short stories by gay men afford a variety of voices concerned with gay identities, gay sex as gay language, homosexual culture within a dominant heterosexual culture, and the gay scene in general. The thread of sexuality runs through them all, most notably in Michael Cunningham's stunning White Angel, which uses sexuality as a gesture of friendship; in Rex Knight's The Number You Have Reached, which dramatizes a gay cop's insistence on being real rather than a fantasy figure objectified by phone sex; in the uncompromising recollection of sibling rivalry tinged with eroticism in Michael Scalisi's The Choice Game; and in John Weir's Homo in Heteroland, in which the narrator transcends his treatment as House Homo and Art-Fag-from-New-York during a vacation with his brother, sister-in-law, and nephews. A strong compilation. Whitney Scott

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 250 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; 1st edition (May 31, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679744770
• ISBN-13: 978-0679744771
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,534,827 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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