About Ed
by
79/99
Critics' Rating Index
17/99
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n/a
Scholars' Citation Index
66/99
Volume of Reviews
33/99
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About This Book
A moving story about love, AIDS, grief, and memory by one of the most adventurous writers to come out of San Francisco's LGBTQ+ scene. Bob Glück met Ed Aulerich-Sugai in 1970. Ed was an aspiring artist; Bob wanted to write. They were young men in San Francisco at the high tide of sexual liberation and soon, and for eight years, they were lovers, after which they were friends. Ed was an explorer in the realms of sex. He was beautiful, fragile, exasperating, serious, unassuaged. In 1994 he died of HIV. His dream notebooks became a touchstone for this book, which Glück has been working on for some two decades, while also making his name as a proponent of New Narrative writing and as one of America's most unusual, venturesome, and lyrical authors. About Ed is about Ed, who remains, as our dead do, both familiar and unknowable, faraway and close. It is about Bob too. The book is a hybrid, at once fiction and fact, like memory, and it takes in many things through tales of political activism and domestic comedy and fury to questions of art and love and experiences of longing and horror. The book also shifts in register, from the delicate to the analytic, to funny and explicit and heartbroken. It begins in the San Francisco of the early 1980s, when Ed and Bob have been broken up for a while. aIds is spreading, but Ed has yet to receive his diagnosis. It follows him backward through his life with Bob in the 1970s and forward through the harrowing particulars of death. It holds on to him and explores his art. It ends in his dreams.
Reviews
"It's as tedious to experience Ed's dreams at length as anybody's, and though Glück plainly strives to be affirming and loving, the prose is more often exhausting."
"The New Narrative encourages active self-questioning on the page, and Glück operates beautifully in this tradition, reconsidering and amending his recollections from the vantage of age."
"Glück's novel is as philosophical and theory-leaning as one would expect from a writer of the New Narrative movement, while still offering carnivalesque carnality, piercing humor, keen social observation, and a humane, earthy sensibility."
"Glück writes through digression, in conversation with the inevitable and the unknown at once."
"The novel's form is not confined to the shape of the page or its syntax; Glück augments a particular kind of shape to his writing—has a spatial dimension that is fleshy and dense, brittle and easily bruised, but one that can also be emptied or hollowed right out."
"Meditating on Ed's death and life, Glück makes death abundant in his own thoughts and actions, and works grief richly into his sentence."
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