Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends - Silas Weir Mitchell
Stephen McCauley is another of those authors who surprised me for how much kind and willing to share his preferences with the readers he is. Anytime I share one of his books with my friends, and in particular Alternatives to Sex, the book listed in my Top 100 Gay Novels, the common opinion is that Stephen McCauley is a sophisticated author, and his books are "beautifully written". And as in the best tradition, Stephen McCauley gifts us a novel every 3/4 years, so that you have to savor, and wait, for any new treat, and 2010 is the year when we are gifted with one of those treats. It's always a pleasure to find out mainstream authors who are still available to their readers. So it's with great pleasure that I welcome Stephen McCauley and his list on this LiveJournal.
10 Books I admire by Stephen McCauley
I tend to freeze up around the word “favorite,” so let’s just call this a list of ten books I like a lot, some of them a little off the beaten path. The ten books I’d take with me into outer space? Not sure, but these are all books I found inspiring at some point in my life, and are ones I still pull off the bookshelf from time to time when I’m in need of a quick shot of humor, pathos, and literary brilliance. 
1) Turn, Magic Wheel by Dawn Powell. Dawn Powell is one of America’s best comic novelists, and this is one of her best novels. A satire of New York’s literary scene in the 1930’s, it is scathing, hilarious, and, like all Powell’s books, so full of sparkling prose and sharply etched characters, you can easily read it multiple times and still find new gems of insight and stylistic invention. The portrait of New York is so vivid, the city becomes a main character. When Powell died in 1965, all of her books were out of print. A laudatory essay by Gore Vidal revived interest, and now her entire body of work is relatively easy to find. Her novel The Happy Island features the a large number of gay characters, but I find this one more engaging. Paperback: 228 pages
Publisher: Zoland Books; 1st pbk edition (January 1, 1999)
Publisher Link:
http://www.steerforth.com/books/display.pperl?isbn=9781883642723ISBN-10: 1883642728
ISBN-13: 978-1883642723
Amazon:
Turn, Magic Wheel Dennis Orphen, in writing a novel, has stolen the life story of his friend, Effie Callingham, the former wife of a famous, Hemingway-like novelist, Andrew Callingham. Orphen’s betrayal is not the only one, nor the worst one, in this hilarious satire of the New York literary scene. (Powell personally considered this to be her best New York novel.) Powell takes revenge here on all publishers, and her baffoonish MacTweed is a comic invention worthy of Dickens. And as always in Powell’s New York novels, the city itself becomes a central character: “On the glittering black pavement legs hurried by with umbrella tops, taxis skidded along the curb, their wheels swishing through the puddles, raindrops bounced like dice in the gutter.” Powell’s famous wit was never sharper than here, but Turn, Magic Wheel is also one of the most poignant and heart-wrenching of her novels.
2) After Claude by Iris Owens. This novel has been out of print for a while, but you can still get copies through used book dealers. Happily, a new edition will be released later this year. After Claude starts out as one of the most jaw-droppingly funny getting-dumped novels ever written, but somewhere in the final third, it turns into a horror story as the narrator loses all her anchors and descends into madness. Owens wrote erotica in Paris in the 50’s and 60’s using the nom de plume “Harriet Daimler.” This was the first of only two novels she published under her own name. The book has a substantial cult following, especially among writers and gay men. The narrator’s voice is so cutting and venomous, it leaves you gasping, but for at least half the book, you’ll laugh aloud on every page. Warning: People either love it or despise it, find it misogynistic or a brave feminist statement, subversive or disgustingly offensive. No middle ground. Paperback: 216 pages
Publisher: NYRB Classics (October 5, 2010)
Publisher Link:
http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/after-claude/ISBN-10: 1590173635
ISBN-13: 978-1590173633
Amazon:
After Claude Harriet has left her boyfriend Claude, “the French rat.” At least that is how she prefers to frame the matter. In fact, after yet one more argument, Claude has just instructed Harriet to move out of his Greenwich Village apartment—not that she has any intention of doing so. To the contrary, she will stay and exact her vengeance—or such is her intention until Claude has her unceremoniously evicted. Still, though moved out, Harriet is not about to move on. Not in any way. Girlfriends circle around to give advice, but Harriet only takes offense, and you can understand why. Because mad and maddening as she may be, Harriet sees past the polite platitudes that everyone else is content to spout and live by. She is an unblinkered, unbuttoned, unrelenting, and above all bitingly funny prophetess of all that is wrong with women’s lives and hearts—until, in a surprise twist, she finds a savior in a dark room at the Chelsea Hotel.
( books from 3 to 10 ) About Stephen McCauley: I grew up outside of Boston and was more or less educated in public schools. I went to the University of Vermont as an undergraduate and studied for a year in France at the University of Nice.
Upon graduation, I worked at hotels, kindergartens (see
The Object of My Affection), ice cream stands, and health food stores. I taught yoga in a church basement and set up a house cleaning service. For many years, I worked as a travel agent (see
The Easy Way Out) and was able to travel somewhat extensively and inexpensively.
In the 1980's, I moved to Brooklyn. After taking a few writing courses at adult learning centers, I enrolled in the MFA writing program at Columbia University. I’d had a desire to write for a long time, but rarely talked about it, mostly because it seemed like an audacious ambition. Being in graduate school gave me the structure and excuse I needed to begin writing more seriously.
At the suggestion of a teacher, the writer Stephen Koch (who recently published a comprehensive, intelligent, and helpful book on writing:
The Modern Library Writers' Workshop) I began working on my first novel. (“Just drop your bucket over the side,” he advised, “and see what comes up.” As for plot, he said: “Not so complicated. Look at Farewell to Arms. Boy meets girl, girl gets pregnant, girl dies, boy walks home in the rain. The end.”)
The first draft of
The Object of My Affection was submitted as my thesis for graduation from Columbia. Stephen Koch offered to send it to an agent, and shortly thereafter, it was accepted by Simon and Schuster. The (mostly) positive response to the book was a surprise to me, and it is a great pleasure to have the book still in print and selling pretty well almost twenty-five years later.
I was working at a travel agency when it was published. About six months later, 20th Century Fox bought an option for the film rights, and I left that line of work. I got a job writing book reviews for The Boston Phoenix and was offered my first teaching job at University of Massachusetts in Boston.
Since 1987, I have taught at UMass, Wellesley College, Harvard University, and, most frequently, at Brandeis University.
I’m a pretty slow and self-conscious sort of writer, and despite my best efforts, there’s been a gap of four or five years between each book.
The Easy Way Out (1992),
The Man of the House (1996),
True Enough (2001),
Alternatives to Sex (2006), and
Insignificant Others (2010). The isolation and self-discipline writing demands doesn’t come easily to me, and so teaching has been a welcome (though time-consuming) part of my work life.
I’ve written book reviews, travel pieces, columns, and articles for a variety of magazines and papers including The New York Times, Travel and Leisure, Vogue, Details, The Washington Post, and many others. I haven’t done much with short fiction, but had a short story published in Harper’s Magazine a while back. It was later anthologized, got an honorable mention in Best American Short Stories, and was read aloud by the actress Vivien Pickles at the Getty Art Museum in Los Angeles. The librettist Mark Campbell is currently writing a libretto based on it for an operatic piece with music by William Bolcom, and I am working with a producer to write a stage adaptation.
My books have done surprisingly well in France, and that part of my career has been an enormous pleasure. Several novels have been bestsellers, I was named a Chevalier in the Order or Arts and Letters, and True Enough was made into a terrific feature film (La Verite Ou Presque) from Films A4 in 2007. It was written and directed by the actor and director Sam Karmann, and has a great cast. Like the film adaptation of The Object of My Affection, it veers off from the novel quite a bit. But the French film kept a lot of my dialogue, which was not the case with Object.
The adaptation of The Object of My Affection shows up on television fairly often, largely, I suspect, due to Jennifer Aniston’s enduring popularity. Over time, I’ve grown more fond of the movie, and find the screenplay (written by the late Wendy Wasserstein) to be moving and far more sturdy than many in the romantic comedy genre.
I’ve begun work on a seventh novel, tentatively titled My Pornographer. It’s very different than my other books, not especially comic, and to be honest, I have no idea if I’ll even be able to finish it. But it’s a pleasure to work on. Additionally, I’m working on a series of novels to be published under a penname. The first will be out in February. Details forthcoming.
When not writing (most of the time, I confess) I’m doing yoga, playing the ukulele, reading student papers or Victorian novels, skiing, ice skating (weather permitting—I hate rinks), biking, or downloading electronic music, new tango, and French pop.
Insignificant Others: A Novel by Stephen McCauley
Hardcover: 243 pages
Publisher: Simon & Schuster (June 8, 2010)
Publisher Link:
http://books.simonandschuster.com/Insignificant-Others/Stephen-McCauley/9780743224758ISBN-10: 0743224752
ISBN-13: 978-0743224758
Amazon:
Insignificant Others What do you do when you discover your spouse has an insignificant other?
How about when you realize your own insignificant other is becoming more significant than your spouse?
There are no easy answers to these questions, but Stephen McCauley—"the master of the modern comedy of manners" (USA Today)—makes exploring them a literary delight.
Richard Rossi works in HR at a touchy-feely software company and prides himself on his understanding of the foibles and fictions we all use to get through the day. Too bad he's not as good at spotting such behavior in himself.
What else could explain his passionate affair with Benjamin, a very unavailable married man? Richard suggests birthday presents for Benjamin's wife and vacation plans for his kids, meets him for "lunch" at a sublet apartment, and would never think about calling him after business hours.
"In the three years I'd known Benjamin, I'd come to think of him as my husband. He was, after all, a husband, and I saw it as my responsibility to protect his marriage from a barrage of outside threats and bad influences. It was the only way I could justify sleeping with him."
Since Richard is not entirely available himself—there's Conrad, his adorable if maddening partner to contend with—it all seems perfect. But when cosmopolitan Conrad starts spending a suspicious amount of time in Ohio, and economic uncertainty challenges Richard's chances for promotion, he realizes his priorities might be a little skewed.
With a cast of sharply drawn friends, frenemies, colleagues, and personal trainers, Insignificant Others is classic McCauley—a hilarious and ultimately haunting social satire about life in the United States at the bitter end of the boom years, when clinging to significant people and pursuits has never been more important—if only one could figure out what they are.
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Gay Shorts, The House of Homosexual Culture series 
Gay Shorts, The House of Homosexual Culture series 
Date: Thursday, July 15, 2010 
Date: Thursday, July 15, 2010 
I have a special place for coming of age stories in my heart, they are usually sweet stories, and the main characters are pure and innocent, and I’m not referring to a mere physical thing, they are innocent in their heart, with their feelings on surface, and so easily to be hurt. For this reason, I admit that, most of the time, when I open such a story, I almost immediately skip to the last page, to see if it’s an happily ever after plot, if these young men will be able to overcome all the obstacles that life will put in front of them, things that at that age seem impossible to fight, while instead, years later regret makes them small events, easy to overcome if they had courage enough. 
I have a special place for coming of age stories in my heart, they are usually sweet stories, and the main characters are pure and innocent, and I’m not referring to a mere physical thing, they are innocent in their heart, with their feelings on surface, and so easily to be hurt. For this reason, I admit that, most of the time, when I open such a story, I almost immediately skip to the last page, to see if it’s an happily ever after plot, if these young men will be able to overcome all the obstacles that life will put in front of them, things that at that age seem impossible to fight, while instead, years later regret makes them small events, easy to overcome if they had courage enough.