Bøker av Brian Bouldrey

For an HIV-positive gay man like Dennis Bacchus, living an active life in early 1990s San Francisco, life was a race against time. New friends were made as quickly as old ones died; it was exhausting, exhilarating and some choices made because, well, why not? Dennis and Jimmy became friends that way until a drug break-through changed everything - an imminent end was no longer certain.With the reprieve, Dennis travels. In France, a chance train encounter introduces Isabelle, a free-living young woman whose presence shakes up his world. On another journey, with Jimmy and Isabelle, Vancouver and Alaska are included. Inspired to become a Catholic priest, Dennis learns to balance his dual life as a celibate gay man and a Jesuit seminarian, teaching in Minneapolis and ministering to AIDS patients in Santa Clara.The Boom Economy covers what was supposed to be the last decade of Dennis Bacchus' life, but turns out to be the first decade of the rest of it. It's a novel about conversion - all of the social, spiritual, and emotional problems of changing from one life to another.The third of Brian Bouldrey's exquisitely wise, tender and witty novels, it was first published in 2003. Brad Craft provides a foreword to the new edition.¿"Bouldrey's diverse and colorful cast of characters, his keen depiction of the complexities of people's psyches, and his deft mixture of the comic and the serious make for a wonderfully rich read. His theme - that love is always risky, no matter what your situation - is beautifully explored in this smart, sensual, and savvy novel." - Phillip Gambone, Out Magazine"Bouldrey's prose is crisp and elegant. He has a gift for using small details and seemingly unlikely events to illuminate his story-line and his characterizations. He also employs poetry, namely the verses that Dennis scribbles in his notebook, to provide a look into the nascent priest's restless psyche. The Boom Economy offers a memorable tale that Bouldrey tells with skill, style, and a refreshing economy." - Jim Nawrocki, Gay & Lesbian Review"I have long admired the wit, compassion and utter poise of Brian Bouldrey's work, his way of finding the hilarity in desperately sad situations, the sharpness and intelligence of his observations of the little details that make up our lives. The Boom Economy is the story of a spiritual quest; and a comedy of manners about living with HIV; and an exploration of love and friendship and loneliness at the end of the century. The amazing thing is that it's so funny, so tender, and so wise all at the same time." - Dan Chaon, Among the Missing

THE STRANGEST BEDFELLOWS PROVIDE THE BEST PILLOW TALK An adult film legend makes you carbonara while you watch from the couch. A distant uncle alone on his cot gives you immunity. Walt Whitman, reclining in the grass, offers - and rescinds - closure. A week on the ward is a glimpse into sanity. The loveliest things can happen in bed. Novelist and essayist Brian Bouldrey, in this new collection of essays, looks at all the things that happen, and don't happen, in the sack. A lifetime of experience generated these appreciations, thoughts, rants, eulogies, and meditations, all part of a conversational book suitable for any bedroom. From memories of friends we have lost to observations about what we have gained, Bouldrey ranges far over the world of travel, love, culture, art, sex, and books - and brings them straight to your nightstand. Good in Bed returns to many of Bouldrey's ongoing preoccupations, not just sex and religion, but travel, too, and personal challenge, and the vicissitudes of friendship and culture. Always deeply felt, often funny, sometimes uplifting, and never dull, Bouldrey's book wants to show us both the striking differences among us, and also, our beautiful sameness. A ReQueered Tales Original Publication.¿¿"Bouldrey's Good in Bed takes the three things you ought never talk about at a party - sex, politics, and religion - and adds a whole new list of topics, like drugs, and madness, and poetry, and poppers, and opera. And The Dirty Sanchez. The reader, like the writer, will find themselves quick to laughing and slowly giving in to a good cry or an even better fit of anger. Every story here is a love story, and every love story has adventure and betrayal, which makes love pretty queer, pretty wild - Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat." - Susie Bright, aka Susie Sexpert, the Best American Erotica series"Brian Bouldrey has traveled further than most - and on foot, survived worse - and lost more, knows the Saints of his religion as only a true devil can, knows the dirtiest words, is suspicious of nostalgia, French men, our pathological need to "relate," Bouldrey's own preference being - and it's the right preference - to remember. Good In Bed is brilliant, funny, deeply moving and historic. Bouldrey at his verve-filled best." - John Bresland, Zero Station and Other Essays"Flip, hilarious, dead-on observant, mordant, and finally amazingly honest and sad. Good in Bed is an unexpected gift from a talented novelist. It's as delicious as tasting assorted chocolate bon-bons from a heart shaped velvet carton, while reading movie magazines and listening to the Go-Go's." - Felice Picano, Like People in History"Bouldrey's Good in Bed is a delight. This is the sort of book that you never want to finish - you get to the last fifty pages and you want it to go on and on. There are so many trips to take with Brian, on the page and in the world, and you will be accompanied by that delightful, curious, and hilarious mind." - Julia Sweeney, God Said Ha!

Modern travelers on foot follow wisdom along the Ulster Way. Storytellers, said Walter Benjamin, are descended from one of two tribes: the mariners or the peasants. We revel in the stories of the sailors, with their lure of exotic places and the treasures a mariner brings home. We hearken to the stories of the peasants for a glimmer of the past, best revealed to natives and landed people. Brian Bouldrey, professional vagabond, and his very organized friend Garth, two unlikely mariners, hit dry land with backpacks and point their hiking boots down the Ulster Way. Along the more than 600 miles of Northern Irish mountains, moors, and monuments, they pursue a quest. Among the causeways and caves and publicans' cups, they seek faraway places revealed by the wisdom that only the peasant can offer.

The writing collected here, culled from mainstream and alternative publications released in 1997, ranges from historical fiction to erotica, from high comedy to suspense, from the experimental to the documentary.