About the Book
Philip Gambone's long-awaited second book of short stories takes off from where his highly acclaimed first collection ended, taking us now into the lives of older gay men, their adventures and challenges, heartaches, and joys. Set largely in Boston, these sixteen loosely interconnected new stories are about men who have experienced and witnessed a lot: marriages and break-ups; rekindling old loves and starting new romances with unlikely partners; the search for sex in an online era; the loss of familiar gay culture; the death of loved ones due to old age, sickness and AIDS; and always the adventure of living in a world where they have to make up the rules as they go along.
Gambone takes us to a radical faerie wedding, a closeted French teacher's classroom, the weekly café gathering of a group of older gay bohemians, a randy eighty-year-old portrait painter who insists his clients pose in the nude, a gay man who discovers his brother is HIV positive, a man in a wheelchair who hires a straight, 23-year-old companion, another who periodically hooks up with a married man half his age, and a long-married gay couple whose weekly visits to a sports café in Boston's Italian neighborhood presents a delicious and dangerous temptation.
Some of these men fight the temptation to live nostalgically in the past; others embrace the new opportunities that come with deeper insight and age. Whatever the case, in each story, Gambone explores how, as older gay men, each of his characters ultimately arrives at a place of greater equanimity, self-acceptance, wisdom, and even spiritual growth.
As George Stambolian said of his first collection, "Philip Gambone has done something extraordinary-he has written with honesty, humor, and compassion about the lives of ordinary gay men. His characters speak to us in voices that are almost hypnotically real. They charm us with their words only to catch us with startling revelations of truth."
Now these "ordinary gay men" have reached a new, more complex stage in their lives, where the pull of multiple responsibilities, conflicting desires, and cross-generational connections both enriches and tests the identities they've built up over the years. Exhilarating, heart-warming, sexy, and very real-these stories zigzag through the twists and turns of each character's life toward a place where gratitude, peace, clarity, and joy radiantly triumph.
About the Author :
Philip Gambone is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. His first collection of short stories, The Language We Use Up Here, and his novel, Beijing, each garnered enthusiastic critical praise.Phil's book of interviews, Something Inside: Conversation with Gay Fiction Writers, was named one of the "Best Books of 1999" by Pride magazine. His Travels in a Gay Nation: Portraits of LGBTQ Americans was nominated for an American Library Association Award. His memoir, As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II, was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by The Boston Globe. He is also the editor of Breaking the Rules: The Intimate Diary of Ross Terrill.Phil has contributed important essays, reviews, features pieces, and scholarly articles to numerous journals including The New York Times Book Review, The Boston Globe, Provincetown Arts, Italian Americana, The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, The Harvard Crimson, and American National Biography. His longer essays have appeared in a number of anthologies, including Hometowns, Sister and Brother, Wrestling with the Angel, Inside Out, Boys Like Us, Wonderlands, and Big Trips.He is a recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, the Massachusetts Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Massachusetts Historical Society. Phil taught high school English for over forty years and college-level writing at the University of Massachusetts, Boston College, and, for over twenty-five years, in the Department of Continuing Education at Harvard, where his courses in expository and fiction writing earned him several awards.Currently, Phil writes a weekly column, "The Writer in Mexico," for the online magazine Lokkal in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
Review :
Praise for Zigzag"Zigzag is a wonderful marvel of the literary imagination. Gorgeously written but colloquial, witty but deeply felt, quotidian but wonderfully insightful - it is how gay men live today. Gambone is that person sitting next to you in a café observing, listening, and getting every detail, down to the smallest gesture and the slightest quivering of the voice, exactly right. These are men he knows, men that we know, and they come alive here as they grapple with love, loss, grief, and joy. Few writers can so accurately capture the tapestry of urban gay male life with such acuity and compassion."-Michael Bronski, author of A Queer History of the United States
"People who complain that all gay fiction portrays hustlers, drag queens and sex machines have never read Philip Gambone, who writes with great clarity and fidelity about ordinary gay Americans."-Edmund White, author of A Boy's Own Story
"In this collection of fully realized, fully fleshed portraits of gay men of a certain age, Philip Gambone reveals the rich, complicated, empowering history that defines a generation. These men are pioneers and survivors - but still growing and still learning. Storytelling at its best."-William Mann, author of The Men from the Boys
"Gambone peoples his fiction as concisely in age and place as Updike and Calisher, and like them, he approaches his characters with a wry, yet mostly affectionate understanding. If all else was lost, future historians might be able to piece together a place and era from Zigzag. Readers will come away from this rich collection of stories with an entire world."-Felice Picano, author of Like People in History
"Phil Gambone's powerful stories evoke the lives of gay men of a certain age as they grapple with loss and find fresh hope. By turns sexy, funny and poignant the result is a queer generational group portrait imbued with humanity and buoyed by a sense of joy."-Raphael Kadushin, editor of Wonderlands
