Adam Mars-Jones

Adam Mars-Jones shares his views on subjects as diverse as Gore Vidal; Martin Amis; Ian McEwan; gay fiction; queer politics; fear of the bomb; Marc Almond; and his mothers.

'We make lazy assumptions about the centre of things and its location. Who's to say that the centre of things isn't in a corner, way over there?' 'Nobody can be a person twenty-fours hours a day - it just can't be done. At night the sets dissolve and the performance falls away. We're off the books.' That's John Cromer talking, in this fresh instalment of his lifelong saga. For John, embarking on a new stage of life in 1970s Cambridge, charm and wit aren't just assets, they are survival skills. It may be a case of John against the world. If so, don't be in too much of a hurry to bet on the world. Conjuring a remarkable voice and mind, Caret is a feast of a novel, served on a succession of small plates, each portion providing an adult's daily intake of literary nourishment. Reading it - like any encounter with John Cromer -- is guaranteed to help you work, rest and play.

"Writing fiction about Aids calls for a sustained effort of adjustment, but then so does everything else to do with the epidemic." So writes Adam Mars-Jones in his introduction to this brave and astonishing book, whose eloquence confers a subtle human dimension on an immense, often faceless crisis. In stories that unfold quietly, with familiarity and domesticity, he assembles a remarkable cast of characters - all of whom are dealing, either peripherally or explicitly, with the central disease of our time. Mars-Jones conveys the horrors of life during the plague through subversive fiction that aims to destroy the truly unconscionable notion of gay life as alien or other. Here are people - patients, lovers, even strangers - whom we recognize as our own, as family and friends. Slim is a portrait of a volunteer 'buddy'- young, healthy, simple - as seen by the wracked man he accompanies. In An Executor we hear the ruminations of a man appointed to remove suspicious garments from a dying friend's closet, lest his grieving parents be shocked. Or in Summer Lightning, a bittersweet story of an unexpected death that comes while two friends sunbathe at the beach. An everyday accident that shatters a couple's carefully suspended brooding on mortality. A man's tape-recorded thoughts, in his last days, about the pleasures of his lovers, the advice of the hospital, and the slow dream-time he has fallen into: 'Imagination is the last thing to fail me.'. Each of these stories possesses its own startling force; their combined impact in this collection is staggering. As The Guardian has written, "Adam Mars-Jones is the Wilfrid Owen of the new long-drawn and deadly trench warfare ... He describes and exemplifies courage, tenderness and defiance."

Cedilla continues the history of John Cromer (‘adventures’ sounds rather too hectic) begun by Pilcrow, described by the London Review of Books as ‘peculiar, original, utterly idiosyncratic’ and by the Sunday Times as ‘truly exhilarating’. John Cromer is the weakest hero in literature - unless he’s one of the strongest. In Cedilla he launches himself into the wider world of mainstream education, and comes upon deeper joys, subtler setbacks. The tone and texture of the two books is similar, but their emotional worlds are very different. The slow unfolding of themes is perhaps closer to Indian classical music than the Western tradition – raga/saga, anyone? This isn’t an epic novel as such things are normally understood, to be sure. It contains no physical battles and the bare minimum of travel, yet surely it qualifies. None of the reviews of Pilcrow explicitly compared it to a coral reef made of a billion tiny Crunchie bars, but that was the drift of opinion. Page by page, Cedilla too provides unfailing pleasure. It’s the book you can read between meals without ruining your appetite.

Seven stories that examine the various effects of AIDS on gay men, their families and their way of life. Adam Mars-Jones: Slim ; An executor ; A small spade ; Remission Edmund White: Palace days ; An oracle ; Running on empty

In, a vivid coming-of-age novel, a young man suddenly wakes up to his gay self—on his eighteenth birthday, when he receives the best gift ever: love and sex. In the woodsy cruising grounds of Box Hill, chubby Colin literally stumbles over glamorous Ray—ten years older, leather-clad, cool, handsome, a biker, and a top. (Colin, if largely unformed, is nevertheless decidedly a bottom.) Colin narrates his love—conveying how mind-blowing being with Ray is—in comically humble-pie terms. “If there are leaders then there must be followers, and I had followership skills in plenty just waiting to be tapped. To this day I can’t see a fat kid in shorts without wanting to rush over and give him what comfort I can. To tell him it won’t always be like this.” Mars-Jones uses Colin’s naivete to give a fresh view of the world and of love. Before long, however, homophobia, class, family strife, and loss rear their ugly heads. Yet in the end, it seems Colin’s modest view oddly takes in the widest horizon: he learns that “people can care about anything.” A surprise and a pleasure, Box Hill is an intensely moving short novel.

Mae West Is Dead represents the best of contemporary lesbian and gay fiction both in Britain and the United States. The twenty-one stories range in setting from Notting Hill to Izmir and include such characters as Annie Oakley and Superman.

Late Spring, directed and co-written by Yasujiro Ozu, was released in 1949, which makes it an old film, or a film that has been new for a long time...' So begins this remarkable essay in narrative reconstruction, which elicits a world of meanings from the reticences of one classic Japanese movie, and reserves to the very end a resolution of its mystery. Adam Mars-Jones gives a virtuoso comeback performance as that lost figure from the earl days of cinema: the film explainer. There has never been a film book like this one.

Venus. Serena. Anna. Martina. Lindsay. Jennifer.Here are the stories behind their stories: the tragic Garbo-like star who is afraid to go outdoors; the teenager who tries to cope with the pressure of the big time as well as an abusive father; the brilliant number one who plays out her adolescent tantrums on the public stage; the coquette who launched a thousand websites; and a little-understood African-American family who proved that they could play by their own rules and still win the game — not to mention the endorsements.In Venus Envy, Sports Illustrated investigative reporter and tennis columnist L. Jon Wertheim covers the biggest story in sports in 2000: Venus Williams. Sidelined for several months by injuries to both her wrists and her psyche, she stormed back to win Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, and two Olympic gold medals. By the time Venus signed the biggest endorsement deal ever for a female athlete, her opponents' sentiments could be described in just two words: Venus Envy.

Lantern Lecture is a stunning debut by a young British writer of extraordinary gifts. Each of the three stories in this collection is a virtuoso performance, a juggling of unlikely subjects and unusual styles that dazzles the reader with the effortless mastery of both tone and content. The stories concern people who are so far from the centre of things that they have to invent the world as they go along (an eccentric, a criminal) and also people (a judge, a Queen) who are so deeply identified with an institution that they somehow cease to exist. But subject matter is only the beginning. The magical transformation of factual material into something sheerly imaginative is one to the hallmarks of the writing. So Lantern Lecture makes of a chaotic true romance an intricate construction that is, for all its brevity and symmetry, almost a transistorised novel. Hoosh-mi, by contract subjects the idea of royalty to a whirlwind of subversive devices. It is an outrageous satire, but is also exhibits a sneaking fondness for its subject. It is a watercolour as well as a cartoon. The longest story, Bathpool Park, is closely based on a famous criminal trial. It sets out to be faithful to the facts, but free in its interpretation. Although the story’s starting point is a sensational case, it moves the reader towards a state of mind inaccessible to journalism. Slice by slice, Bathpool Park analyses not only the British legal system, but the other other agents (press, police) which co-operate with it but need not share its priorities. And when elements are reassembled, everything looks a little different.

‘I’m not sure that I can claim to have taken my place in the human alphabet, even as its honorary twenty-seventh letter. I’m more like a specialised piece of punctuation, a cedilla, umlaut or pilcrow, hard to track down on the keyboard of a computer or typewriter. Pilcrow is the prettiest of the bunch, assessed purely as a word. And at least it stands on its own. It doesn’t perch or dangle. Pilcrow it is.’ That’s the reader’s introduction to John Cromer, one of the most unusual heroes in all literature. If the minority is always right, John must be practically infallible. He experiences his 1950s childhood as a sort of ramshackle isolation tank, screening out sensation and adventure. Of course, as he points out, time passed slowly for everyone in the fifties, it wasn’t just him, but it’s hard to deny him the status of a special case. From that point on, John’s epic task becomes clear. He must climb out of the tank and make his way somehow on land. Pilcrow is an exploration of a rich but marginal life, an engrossing story with a vibrant supporting cast of ghouls, matrons and sexual adventurers.

30 amerikanische und europaische Erzähler auf einen Blick: Generationenvertreter, deren Haltungen zu literarischen Traditionen genauso widersprüchlich und interessant sind wie ihr Erfahrungshunger und ihre Themen es sind. Erzählungen und Romanauszüge von Lisa Alther, Martin Amis, Paul Auster, René Belletto, William Boyd, Françoise Bouillot, Peter Carey, Jean-Claude Charles, Liane Dirks, Jean Echenoz, Deborah Eisenberg, Bret Easton Ellis, Louise Erdrich, Martin Groß, Hervé Guibert, Lisbet Hiide, Christoph Klimke, David Leavitt, Adam Mars-Jones, Susan Minot, Christa Moog, Lorrie Moore, Craig Nova, Marcelo Rubens Paiva, Alina Reyes, Christa Schmidt, Irini Spanidou, Pier Vittorio Tondelli, Christof Wackernagel un Tobias Wolff, die beeindrucken und dem Leser im Kopf bleiben. 30 Autoren unter 40, deren Texte zeigen, daß es sie überall auf der Welt gibt: die Besten von morgen.

"If you work hard enough, if you want it enough, if you're smart and talented and "good enough," you can do anything. Except get pregnant. Her whole life, Lucy Knisley wanted to be a mother. But when it was finally the perfect time, conceiving turned out to be harder than anything she'd ever attempted. Fertility problems were followed by miscarriages, and her eventual successful pregnancy plagued by health issues, up to a dramatic, near-death experience during labor and delivery. This moving, hilarious, and surprisingly informative memoir not only follows Lucy's personal transition into motherhood but also illustrates the history and science of reproductive health from all angles, including curious facts and inspiring (and notorious) figures in medicine and midwifery. Whether you've got kids, want them, or want nothing to do with them, there's something in this graphic memoir to open your mind and heart."--Amazon.

Pristina, Kosovo, 1999. Barry Ashton, recently divorced, has been deployed as a civil engineer attached to the Royal Engineers corps in the British Army. In an extraordinary feat of ventriloquism, Adam Mars-Jones constructs a literary story with a thoroughly unliterary narrator, and a narrative that is anything but comic through the medium of a character who, essentially, is. Exploring masculinity, class and identity, Batlava Lake is a brilliant story of men and war by one of Britain's most accomplished writers.

Taking as their theme the power of two English institutions--the monarchy and the justice system--two stories demonstrate with delectable wit how individuals can become so bound to the institutions they serve that they cease to exist. Hoosh-Mi, Queen Elizabeth II contracts rabies from a corgi; and Bathpool Park, focuses on the trial of Donald Neilson, the so-called "Black Panther," who after a series of post office robberies involving three murders kidnapped seventeen-year-old Lesley Whittle of whose murder he was also convicted.

From Amazon.com: William and Terry chanced upon monogamy before it became the symbol of a world ruled by illness and denial. The author--an acclaimed voice in the gay community--offers a brilliant, hilarious, and touching novel about love and desire in the plague years.