Not a contest but however you're celebrating today's release of Tom Spanbauer's I Loved You More
[Kindle], his former writing student, the super-successful, long-closeted, now openly queer Chuck Palahniuk has outmanned you: He sent gift baskets to 50 indie bookstores to promote the novel.
Huffington Post named it one of eight small press books to watch in 2014.
Wild author Cheryl Strayed calls it "a wrenching and beautiful masterpiece," saying, "intelligence, wit, generosity, love, wisdom, insight, humility, guts, heart-crushing truth and spirit-lifting grace—it’s all there in I Loved You More."
Having successfully mapped the historical western (The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon), the aids novel (In the City of Shy Hunters), and the 60's rural gay bildungsroman (Now Is the Hour), Spanbauer again charts fresh territory in his fifth book. Hawthorne calls it "a love story triangle akin to The Marriage Plot
and Freedom
only with a gay main character who charms gays and straights alike. I Loved You More is a rich, expansive tale of love, sex, and heartbreak, covering twenty-five years in the life of a striving, emotionally wounded writer. In New York, Ben forms a bond of love with his macho friend and foil, Hank. Years later in Portland, a now ill Ben falls for Ruth, who provides the care and devotion he needs, though they cannot find true happiness together. Then Hank reappears and meets Ruth, and real trouble starts. Set against a world of struggling artists, the underground sex scene of New York in the 1980s, the drab, confining Idaho of Ben’s youth, and many places in between, I Loved You More is the author’s most complex and wise novel to date."
Bluntly, Spanbauer is yet another big gay talent who used to be published in hardcover by eminent New York houses and now is published as a paperback original by a fine small press. Your support is doubly needed.
Starting tonight in Portland, Tom tours eight dates in Oregon or Seattle and New York City on May 13 at the LGBT Center.
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