Hear Us Out

Rating:
Summary: So much tell-all...
Review: I read this author's first book of conversations with gay writers, Gay Fiction Speaks. It was brilliant - these were real conversations, not interviews, and showed off all the writers at their wittiest and smartest. I have been waiting so long for volume two, and now here it is (though why not use the same title?).

The most fascinating stuff here comes from Gary Indiana, an author I've liked a lot but never read about or from apart from his novels. This conversation is really explosive - especially on 9/11. Also the Michael Cunningham interview was full of things I didn't know - the 'lost' novel, what he really thinks about Virginia Woolf and the film of The Hours, why he likes drag. Dale Peck was much sweeter here than I thought from his mad axeman reviews. Chris Bram ('Father of Frankenstein', 'Gossip', 'Dr August') erudite as expected.

There's a great conversation with Irish novelist Colm Toibin, which made me realise how different gay writing can be, depending on the context. His work is truly Irish; that's how to make sense of it. He talks about a novel about Henry James which isn't out yet called 'The Master'.

Equally diverse and regional are the novels of Jim Grimsley. Again, I didn't know much about this writer, but his white, Southern trash origins and how they feature in his novels - very interesting. 'Dream Boy' is a masterpiece.

Stephen McCauley is someone many of you will know ('Object of My Affection'). But he isn't really spoken of too seriously, in my experience. His piece shows that he is a real genius of the comic novel form.

Other writers I want to read more of now include Peter Cameron, Paul Russell, Bernard Cooper, Matthew Stadler and Brit Philip Hensher. Canning is to be congratulated for the sparkling prose of Hear Us Out.

If I were still a student, I'd be using this to write on these books so that more people will take them more seriously.

There are some novelists I still want to hear from (Mark Merlis, Samuel Delany, Jamie O'Neill), but the author promises a third volume. Let's hope it's not such a long wait.