This "tender and lyrical" memoir (New York Times Book Review) remains one of the most compelling documents of the AIDS era-"searing, shattering, ultimately hope inspiring account of a great love story" (San Francisco Examiner). A National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and the winner of the PEN Center West literary award.From Publishers WeeklyWrenching in its detail, this account of the author's final two years with his companion and "beloved friend" Roger Horwitz, who died of AIDS in 1986, personalizes the epidemic's appalling statistics with heartbreaking clarity. Poet and novelist Monette (Love Alone: 18 Elegies for Rog) applies admirable candor and control to the task of chronicling the suffering endured in the months between the diagnosis and death of the man with whom he had spent over 10 years. Monette brings to the narrative a poet's eye for the telling image or metaphor, and makes this far more than a simple compendium of medical disasters: the memoir transcends the particulars of the AIDS epidemic to stand as an eloquent testimonial to the power of love and the devastation of loss, the courage of the ill and the anger, fear and dedication of their loved ones. Despite its universal resonances, the book is perhaps most valuable as a vital addition to the literature of the AIDS epidemic. Affluent and exceptionally well connected in the L.A. gay elite, Horwitz was no typical AIDS patient: Monette maneuvered him into various experimental programs (he was the first AIDS patient west of the Mississippi to have access to AZT), and the firsthand glimpse of the "netherworld of the sick," negotiating the byzantine route to the next "magic bullet" offers vivid confirmation of the human cost of the government's initial policy of informed neglect. "A gay man seeks his history in mythic fragments, random as blocks of stone in the ruins covered in Greek characters, gradually being erased in the summer rain," the author writes of a trip to Greece he and Horwitz took shortly before the diagnosis. Monette's moving history is just such a fragment for future generations, a touchstone reference to a tragic time that we cannot allow to be erased. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal"Why don't you write about this? Nobody else does." These words, from one of the doctors treating Monette's lover Roger Horwitz during his well-fought but losing battle with AIDS, prompted this book. Purged of the tendency toward jeremiad he displayed in Love Alone ( LJ 4/1/88), poems written during the last months of Rog's life, Monette has fused "unresolved rage" with eloquence to produce a gripping, accessible, and essential book. Monette captures the everyday minutiae and roller coaster emotions of living with AIDS, taking us from his first personal exposure to the epidemic via an old friend, through the 19 months between Rog's diagnosis and death. Monette's solipsistic dedication to a community of prosperous, white gay men can be annoying, but the book's strength is that it is always annoyingly, believably real. BOMC alternate.Rob Schmieder, BostonCopyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The tragic true story of a love cut short by AIDS, written by National Book Award winner Paul MonetteIn 1974, Paul Monette met Roger Horwitz, the man with whom he would share more than a decade of his life. In 1986, Roger died of complications from AIDS. Borrowed Time traces this love story from start to tragic finish. At a time when the medical community was just beginning to understand this mysterious and virulent disease, Monette and others like him were coming to terms with unfathomable loss. This personal account of the early days of the AIDS crisis tells the story of love in the face of death.A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Borrowed Time was one of the first memoirs to deal candidly with AIDS and is as moving and relevant now as it was more than twenty-five years ago. Written with fierce honesty and heartwarming tenderness, this book is part love story, part testimony, and part requiem.

Seven men. War was their profession, death an occupational hazard. But this time, they weren’t fighting a war. They were fighting something far more deadly . . .PREDATOR One by one, it stalked them. And one by one, they died, each death more horrifying than the last.Only one man is left. Major Alan Schaefer. Now, in the heart of the jungle, he must face the most terrifying creature ever to land on Earth. One on one . . .

Two male lovers, a legendary movie goddess, an estate caretaker, a repressed prep-school teacher, and a polyestered Beverly Hills agent mount an incredible scam in Paul Monette's witty and wicked novel. Beth Carroll, a wealthy old lady cared for by her gay houseboy David and by Phidias, the overseer of the estate and her lover for fifty years, has died before signing her will which will protect her magnificent property from being sold to developers, Phidias enlists David's aid, and David calls in his old lover Rick and the latter's famous friend, the Dietrich-esque chanteuse Madeleine Cosquer, who in turn brings in her agent, Aldo, a hip L.A. queen. Together they develop an impossible plan to fulfill Mrs. Carroll's last wish.

An unlikely pair races to find a murderer in the hazy underbelly of Los AngelesVivien Cokes and her husband, Jasper, are LA royalty, and they have the lifestyle to prove it. Big parties, a huge mansion in Malibu, and complicated affairs are all part of the package. However, during a morning swim, Vivien makes a discovery that changes her life forever. Smelling smoke, she sees her home in flames, and inside, she finds her husband dead in the hot tub with his male lover in an apparent double suicide.To find out the truth behind her husband's death, Vivien must turn to the unlikeliest of sources: a failed writer and grifter who was the boyfriend of her husband's late lover. After finding kinship in a sort of shared widowhood, the two set out to bring to justice the people behind their loved ones' deaths.Paul Monette has a poet's touch, and his aptitude is on full display in The Long Shot as he immerses readers in a mystery with a cast of characters that is as diverse and memorable...

THE IMMORTAL SHOCKER A daring modern version of a classic story. Werner Herzog’s Dracula is not the one you remember, but it’s one you will never forget.Nosferatu is Count Dracula: the pale, wraithlike figure with the seeking mouth. Lucy Harker is the alluring and courageous woman who realizes, in mounting terror, that the only way to defeat a vampyre is to give of herself, totally, from darkness to dawn.Love and innocence, sensuality and death, passion and sacrifice—all are explored with hypnotic intensity in NOSFERATU, a major event of world cinema, and now, with Paul Monette’s tingling novel, a litery event as well.

A child of the 1950s from a small New England town, "perfect Paul" earns straight A's and shines in social and literary pursuits, all the while keeping a secret -- from himself and the rest of the world. Struggling to be, or at least to imitate, a straight man, through Ivy League halls of privilege and bohemian travels abroad, loveless intimacy and unrequited passion, Paul Monette was haunted, and finally saved, by a dream of "the thing I'd never even seen: two men in love and laughing."Searingly honest, witty, and humane, Becoming a Man is the definitive coming-out story in the classic coming-of-age genre.Amazon.com ReviewPaul Monette first made a name for himself in 1978 with his debut novel, Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll, a comic romp with serious overtones. He established himself as a writer of popular fiction with three more novels before he and his lover were both diagnosed with HIV. In 1988 he wrote On Borrowed Time, a memoir of living with AIDS and of his lover's death. The passion and anger that fueled On Borrowed Time surfaces again in 1992's Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, his National Book Award-winning autobiography. Although it follows the traditional structure of the autobiography and bildungsroman--early family life, education, reflections on how art influenced the subject's view of life--Becoming a Man also filters Monette's story through two central facts: the closet and AIDS. Monette writes of the pain of being closeted, the effect it had on his writing, and how it shaped (and often destroyed) his relationships. Monette's fear and fury at AIDS and homophobia heighten the same skill and imagination he put into his fiction. This vision--poetic yet highly political, angry yet infused with the love of life--is what transforms Becoming a Man from simple autobiography into an intense record of struggle and salvation. Paul Monette did not lead a life different from many gay men--he struggled courageously with his family, his sexuality, his AIDS diagnosis--but in bearing witness to his and others' pain, he creates a personal testimony that illuminates the darkest corners of our culture even as it finds unexpected reserves of hope. From Publishers WeeklyMonette responds to readers of his first memoir, Borrowed Time, by providing the flip-side expository of his life in the closet until he met his soul mate--the laughing man, Roger Horwitz. This memoir (which might more aptly have been titled Wasted Time ) is a bitter reproach of the 27 years Monette spent searching for himself. He explains that it took him years to realize that the homophobe is the deviant. Reading this beautifully written book, one feels as trapped by its dark mood as the author was by the closet. The writing is occasionally marred, however, by repetitive phrases, such as "playing courtier," "the closet" and the endless search for "the laughing man." The story also unfolds choppily due to frequent references to the future. Nevertheless, the book is a heartfelt illumination of how a gay person overcame the self-reproach that societal condemnation enacts. Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

SCARFACE In the spring of 1980, under intense pressure from the United States, Cuba opened its port at Mariel Harbor, and thousands set sail for America. They came in search of the American Dream. One of them found it. Those who challenged him, he crushed. Those who tried to stop him, he killed.

"Affecting and lyrical...A wise and intensely touching book."--San Francisco Chronicle In Halfway Home, Paul Monette, the National Book Award winning author of Becoming a Man delivers a "fast-paced novel that swings between humor and tragedy, high camp and lowdown realism, gays and straights, winners and losers, people who are dying and people who are afraid to live" (Los Angeles Times). Halfway Home centers around the story of thirty-four year old Tom Shaheen, an actor living with AIDS in southern California who has been forced to retire, because of his illness, to an isolated beach house. Tom's peaceful existence is shaken to the core when he receives a sudden and unexpected visit from his brother, Brian, a former high school football hero who, well-loved and athletic, was Tom's exact opposite while growing up. Brian's visit turns out to be more than Tom bargained for--Brian is seeking safety and sanctuary for himself and his family because of shady dealings in his contractor business back in Connecticut. In the midst of dealing with his brother's crisis, Tom begins to bond deeply with his landlord. Gray--a connection that evolves into a bittersweet love affair, inspiring hope that there can be a life after AIDS. Halfway Home is "an exceptionally honest and expressive work...a satisfyingly sane novel about living in an insane time" (The New York Times Book Review).From Publishers WeeklyAn affecting and timely story of reconciliation, forgiveness and love in the face of AIDS. Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review"Angry, joyful, funny and sometimes outrageous."