Celebrating Peter Cameron & Anticipating Mario Vargas Llosa

     

The literary gods confused their players at last’s Tribeca dinner night honoring Coral Glynn [Kindle] and I was permitted a place at the head table with Peter Cameron and his FSG editor/publisher Jonathan Galassi. Praise for Peter poured in from every inch of the elegant, candlelit room while I besieged Jonathan asking about his own new book of poems charting his love for a younger man, Left-handed [Kindle], and about Mario Vargas Llosa’s forthcoming The Dream of the Celt. Jonathan confirmed that in the novel Irish nationalist Roger Casement is actively gay though, like others, Vargas Llosa thinks some of his lustier diary entries were fantasies. Preorder now or mark June 5 on your calendar because this promises to be the true queer novel of the summer (while John Irving will inevitably grab more attention for his bi book In One Person [Kindle] out May 8). Also with us were, among others, cover artist Duncan Hannah, performing artist John Kelly who is enthralled with Sarah Schulman’s new The Gentrification of the Mind [Kindle], and Peter’s (very beautiful) Italian translator Giuseppina Oneto who also translated Wolf Hall, Andrew Sean Greer, Kiran Desai, and Gore Vidal, and announced that Peter’s previous novel is again riding high on the Italian bestseller lists thanks to a movie tie-in. Have you done your part so the same can be said of Coral Glynn in America?

Comments

[Sandy]

Excellent on all counts. And so fitting that this entry is close on the heels of your Denton Welch moment.