David Van Leer
This volume--the second in Canning's groundbreaking account of Anglo-American gay male fiction--is essential reading for anyone interested in gay culture, contemporary fiction, or both. Readers new to the work will find insight mixed with anecdote in a way that charms as it instructs. But even readers already familiar with astonishing breadth of Canning's work are likely to be pleasantly surprised by this new volume. For while the last volume looked backward to construct a literary history out of established figures, this one looks forward to bring that history right up to today. There are of course the famous names (among them Cunningham, Cooper, Indiana, and Bram). But there are also ones younger and less familiar (like Grimsley, Tóibín, and Hensher). The exciting diversity of the interviews, and indeed the interviewees, makes this not merely a history of the present, but a peek into the future.
— David Van Leer, University of California, Davis
David Bergman
Richard Canning is the Boswell of an entire generation of gay writers, inducing them ro reveal themselves with rare candor, conviction and intelligence. This is sublime book-talk in which we get to know these men as people and authors, public figures and private individuals, craftsmen and cranks. Sometimes startling, often amusing, never dull, these conversations led me back in new ways to works I thought I understood and to new works (and authors) I am anxious to experience.
— David Bergman, Editor of Men on Men 2000 and The Violet Quill Reader
Gregory Woods
This second volume of interviews with important gay novelists confirms the promise of the first volume. Richard Canning is just what one hopes for in an interviewer: tactful but probing, modest but very well-informed, serious but good-humoured, detailed but never trivial. His interviews will be enjoyable for the general reader and invaluable for the gay literary scholar. They are a wonderful resource.
— Gregory Woods, author of "Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-Eroticism and Modern Poetry" and "This is No Book: A Gay Reader"
