reviews_and_ramblings | André Aciman (born January 2, 1951)

André Aciman (born on 2 January 1951 in Alexandria, Egypt) is a writer, currently distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of City University of New York teaching the history of literary theory and the works of Marcel Proust. His memoir, Out of Egypt (1995), won a Whiting Writers' Award. He previously taught creative writing at New York University and French literature at Princeton University. In 2009 Aciman was Visiting Distinguished Writer at Wesleyan University.

Aciman was born in Egypt in a French-speaking home where family members also spoke Italian, Greek, Ladino, and Arabic. His family were Jews of Turkish and Italian origin who settled in Alexandria, Egypt in 1905. Aciman moved with his family to Italy at the age of fifteen and then to New York at nineteen.

Aciman's 1995 memoir, Out of Egypt, was reviewed widely. In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani described the volume as a "remarkable memoir...that leaves the reader with a mesmerizing portrait of a now vanished world." She compared his work with that of Lawrence Durrell and also wrote: "There are some wonderfully vivid scenes here, as strange and marvelous as something in Garcia Marquez, as comical and surprising as something in Chekhov."

Call Me by Your Name (2007) is included in my Best XXI century Gay Novels (2000-2009).

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Aciman

Further Readings:

Call Me by Your Name: A Novel by André Aciman
Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Picador (January 22, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 031242678X
Amazon: Call Me by Your Name: A Novel

Call Me by Your Name is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents' cliffside mansion on the Italian Riviera. During the restless summer weeks, unrelenting but buried currents of obsession, fascination, and desire intensify their passion as they test the charged ground between them and verge toward the one thing both already fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy. André Aciman's critically acclaimed debut novel is a frank, unsentimental, heartrending elegy to human passion.

More Spotlights at my website: http://www.elisarolle.com/, My Lists/Gay Novels