C. Dale Young's Blog, page 35

Artist: Kylie Stillman

On an unseasonably warm autumn day, an American teacher enters a public
bathroom beneath Sofia’s National Palace of Culture. There he meets
Mitko, a charismatic young hustler, and pays him for sex.  He returns to
Mitko again and again over the next few months, drawn by hunger and
loneliness and risk, and finds himself ensnared in a relationship in
which lust leads to mutual predation, and tenderness can transform into
violence. As he struggles to reconcile his longing with the anguish it
creates, he’s forced to grapple with his own fraught history, the world
of his southern childhood where to be queer was to be a pariah. There
are unnerving similarities between his past and the foreign country he
finds himself in, a country whose geography and griefs he discovers as
he learns more of Mitko’s own narrative, his private history of illness,
exploitation, and want.

Garth Greenwell’s debut novel is out from FSG, and it is already getting rave reviews. This is one not to miss! Order it and read it as soon as you can.