The prettiest star / Carter Sickels.
Material type:
TextPublisher: Spartanburg, SC : Hub City Press, [2020]Copyright date: ©2020Edition: First editionDescription: 295 pages ; 24 cmContent type: - text
- unmediated
- volume
- 9781938235627
- 1938235622
| Item type | Home library | Collection | Call number | Materials specified | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Adult Book
|
Dr. James Carlson Library | Fiction | Sickels, Carter | Available | 33111009818358 | ||||
|
Adult Book
|
Main Library | Fiction | Sickels, Carter | Available | 33111009635117 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
One of 2020's most acclaimed books. A Kirkus Best Fiction Book of 2020 * One of O Magazine's Best LGBT Books of 2020 * A Finalist for the Southern Book Prize * One of the Women's National Book Association's 2020 Great Group Reads Selections * EW's 50 Most Anticipated Books of 2020 * BookRiot * Lambda Literary's * Salon * BookPage's * Garden & Gun's * Logo NewNowNext's
In this "brutally fresh kind of homecoming novel," (Entertainment Weekly) Brian Jackson returns to his small Appalachian hometown and the family who rejected him. Carter Sickels's stunning literary achievement "deserves a place in the canon of AIDS literature alongside the likes of Larry Kramer and Rebecca Makkai" (Los Angeles Review of Books).
The story of Brian's return to small-town Ohio is told in a chorus of voices: Brian's mother Sharon; his fourteen-year-old sister, Jess, as she grapples with her brother's mysterious return; and the video diaries Brian makes to document his final summer. Written in prose that seeks "to answer without flinching away from ugliness and without demonizing the ignorant" (Salon), The Prettiest Star offers an urgent portrait of a family in the center of a national crisis, in order to tell a unique story about the politics and fragility of the body, and to explore the bounds of family and redemption.
Includes bibliographical references.
"Small-town Appalachia doesn't have a lot going for it, but it's where Brian is from, where his family is, and where he's chosen to return to die. At eighteen, Brian, like so many other promising young gay men, arrived in New York City without much more than a love for the freedom and release from his past that it promised. But within six short years, AIDS would claim his lover, his friends, and his future. With nothing left in New York but memories of death, Brian decides to write his mother a letter asking to come back to the place, and family, he was once so desperate to escape. Set in 1986, a year after Rock Hudson's death shifted the public consciousness of the epidemic and brought the news of AIDS into living rooms and kitchens across America, The Prettiest Star is part Dog Years by Mark Doty and part Tell the Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rifka Brunt. But it is also an urgent story now: it a novel about the politics and fragility of the body; it is a novel about sex and shame. And it is a novel that speaks to the question of what home and family means when we try to forge a life for ourselves in a world that can be harsh and unpredictable. It is written at the far reaches of love and understanding, and zeroes in on the moments where those two forces reach for each other, and sometimes touch."-- Provided by publisher.