John Weir

John Weir, winner of the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction for Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me, is the author of two novels, The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, winner of the 1989 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men’s Debut Fiction, and What I Did Wrong. He is an associate professor of English at Queens College CUNY, where he teaches the MFA in creative writing and literary translation. In 1991, with members of ACT UP New York, he interrupted Dan Rather’s CBS Evening News to protest government and media neglect of AIDS. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

John Weir by Beowulf Sheehan

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Your Nostalgia is Killing Me

John Weir

Publication Date: April 26, 2022

$16.95 Tradepaper

ISBN: 9781636280295

Description:

In eleven linked stories, prize-winning novelist John Weir brings his wit and compassion to the question of how a gay white guy from New Jersey lived through fifty years of the twin crises of global AIDS and toxic masculinity in America.

John Weir, author of The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, a defining novel of 1980s New York in its response to the global AIDS crisis, has written a story collection that chronicles the long aftermath of epidemic death, as recorded in the tragicomic voice of a gay man who survived high school in the 1970s, the AIDS death of his best friend in the 1990s, and his complicated relationship with his mother, “a movie star without a movie to star in,” whose life is winding to a close in a retirement community where she lives alone with her last dog.

ADVANCE PRAISE

Your Nostalgia is Killing Me is a witty short story collection. Eleven linked first-person short stories tell the story of a protagonist whose early adolescent experiences of homophobia in a small town and whose adult loss of his best friend to AIDS during the height of the epidemic write the script for his life, propelling him in and out of relationships with friends, loved ones, and lovers who expect too much or too little. Taking place at acting classes, cinemas, funerals, high school graduation ceremonies, plays, public protest demonstrations, retirement homes, and sex parlors, these eleven linked stories pull at the thin line between erasure and exposure, all the while skillfully highlighting the performative nature of death, grief, illness, love, masculinity, and sexuality against the backdrop of late twentieth-century US culture.”
—Dr. Amina Gautier

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