Dancer from the Dance

Andrew Holleran's first novel, Dancer from the Dance, was published in 1978. He is also the author of the novels Nights in Aruba and The Beauty of Men; a book of essays, Ground Zero (reissued as Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited); a collection of short stories, In September, the Light Changes; and a novella, Grief.

"An astonishingly beautiful book. The best gay novel written by anyone of our generation." - Harper's magazine

"Holleran summons up the most lyrical prose imaginable. The novel is a banquet." - Boston Globe

"We have never been to Fire Island and we have never lived on the Lower East Side, but we have looked for love and we are growing older, and this book is the story of our life." - New York magazine

"Compelling characters and a vision of society, straight and gay." - Village Voice

"Beautifully written, evocative, and hilarious. . . . Holleran has the uncanny ability to combine emotional abandon and high comedy." - New Republic

"Superb . . . erotic heat percolates through these pages." - New York Times Book Review

"Through the sweat and haze of longing come piercing insights - about the closeness of gay male friendship, about the vanity and imperfections of men. The more one reads the novel, we realise that what Holleran has given us is our very own queer (queerer?) Great Gatsby: its decadence, its fear, its violence, its ecstasy, its transience." - The Guardian

"Andrew Holleran's 'Dancer from the Dance,'. . . is bathed in melancholy gorgeousness, as attuned as any of its characters to 'the animal bliss of being alive.'" - The New Yorker

"Nothing could be more beautiful than Holleran's tableaux of New York, those hot summer city nights when lonely men sit on their stoops or their fire escapes and stare at that endless parade of unattainable lovers." - Boston Globe

"Dancer from the Dance accomplished for the 1970's what The Great Gatsby achieved for the 1920's the glamorization of a decade and a culture." - Edmund White