DANGEROUS BEAUTY

For more than five decades, with relentless candor, biting wit, and striking imagery, Bruce Benderson's fiction has celebrated the warped beauty of our megalopolises, including their clashes between the classes and their subcultures of sex and drugs. Oppressed but flamboyant, the voices of his subterranean worlds have become just too intense to be ignored.

Now, for the first time, all his short texts, including 21 never before published, appear together in the same volume. Included is one of the first post-Stonewall coming out stories, written in 1970, decades before such narratives developed into a full genre. This, then, is the complete and definitive Bruce Benderson reader.

Benderson's most well-known book, The Romanian: Story of an Obsession, was awarded the prestigious Prix de Flore in its French edition. Other publications include the essay collection Sex and Isolation, the short story collection Pretending to Say No, and the novels Pacific Agony and User.

ADDITIONAL BUYING OPTIONS

  • "Crazed, exhilarating reading... Taut, driven, culturally astute, politically cranky and packed with Oscar Wilde-worthy epigrams."  —Michael Upchurch, The Seattle Times

    "What astonishes and intrigues is Benderson's way of recounting, in the sweetest possible voice, things that are considered shocking."  —Josyane Savigneau, Le Monde

  • BRUCE BENDERSON is a novelist, essayist and translator whose most well-known book, The Romanian: Story of an Obsession, was awarded the prestigious Prix de Flore in its French edition. Other publications include the essay collection Sex and Isolation, the novels Pacific Agony and User, and the story collection Pretending to Say No. He has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Libération and many other American and French publications. He regularly translates books from the French.