Christopher Bram Books In Order

Surprising Myself

A brilliant debut novel about the relationship between a boy and his homosexual friend.

In Memory of Angel Clare

The new novel by the bestselling author of Hold Tight, this brilliant comedy of manners set among a group of Manhattan sophisticates depicts the friends of a dead filmmaker trying to put their lives back together a task made more arduous by the young boyfriend he left behind.

Father of Frankenstein

Previously titled Father of Frankenstein, this acclaimed novel was the basis for the 1998 film starring Sir Ian McKellen, Lynn Redgrave, and Brendan Fraser. It journeys back to 1957 Los Angeles, where James Whale, the once famous director of such classics as Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, is living in retirement, haunted by his past. Rescuing him from his too vivid imagination is his gardener, a handsome ex marine. The friendship between these two very different men is sometimes tentative, sometimes touching, often dangerous and always captivating.

This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

Gossip

Regretting his affair with a Republican journalist, Ralph becomes caught in the middle of a political controversy when his former lover’s tell all book is published, and then Bill is murdered, leaving Ralph the prime suspect in the crime. Tour.

Notorious Dr. August

Christopher Bram tells the story of Augustus Fitzwilliam Boyd, alias Dr. August, a clairvoyant pianist who communes with ghosts, and who finds meaning in his life through a strange love triangle with a righteous ex slave and nervous white governess. Spanning the years between the Civil War and the early 1920’s, this riveting and ambitious historical novel displays the immense talents of a prodigious, highly esteemed author working at the height of his powers.

Lives of the Circus Animals

Critically acclaimed novelist Christopher Bram has written some of his best work about life in the performing arts. In Father of Frankenstein, the basis for the Academy Award winning movie Gods and Monsters, it was Hollywood in the thirties and fifties. In The Notorious Dr. August: His Real Life and Crimes, it was the strange world of Victorian music and spiritualism. Now, in Lives of the Circus Animals, Bram explores contemporary New York theater, spending several days and nights with a diverse handful of men and women. There is Caleb Doyle, a hot new playwright whose newest work, Chaos Theory, has just bombed. His sister, Jessie, also loves theater but has no outlet for her talents except to work as the personal assistant to British actor Henry Lewse, ‘the Hamlet of his generation,’ while he does a Broadway musical. Henry loves Shakespeare, money, grass, and boys. Then there’s Frank Earp, an ex actor who courts Jessie and is directing a troupe of acting students in a homemade play. Among the students is Toby Vogler, a nice kid from the Midwest who has a whole other career at night. Toby was once Caleb Doyle’s boyfriend. Overseeing this world like an unhappy god is Kenneth Prager, second string theater critic for the New York Times. Leaping from one life to another, one day to the next, the novel throws these people together in a serious comedy about love and work and make believe. Lives of the Circus Animals is a cross between a Mozart opera and a Preston Sturges movie. A look at theater people who are just like everyone else, only more so, it’s a comic celebration of how we all strive to stay sane while living in the shadow of those two impostors, success and failure.

Exiles in America

Zack Knowles, a psychologist, and Daniel Wexler, an art teacher at a college in Virginia, have been together for twenty one years. In the fall of 2002, a few months before the Iraq War, a new artist in residence, Abbas Rohani, arrives with his Russian wife, Elena, and their two children. But Abbas is not quite what he seems, and he begins an affair with Daniel. Soon politics intrude upon two families thrown together by love, threatening the future of both in ways no one could have predicted.

A novel that explores how the personal becomes political, Exiles in America offers an intimate look at the meaning of marriage, gay and straight.

Mapping the Territory

Novelist Christopher Bram has been writing essays for twenty five years. Mapping the Territory, his first collection of nonfiction, ranges through such topics as the power of gay fiction, coming out in the 1970s in Virginia, low budget filmmaking with friends in New York, and the sexual imagination of Henry James. He describes the heady experience of seeing his novel Gods and Monsters made into an Oscar winning movie starring Ian McKellen, Brendan Fraser, and Lynn Redgrave; and he discusses why he and his partner of thirty years don’t want to get married. Bram looks both into and out of himself in these essays. He revisits the titles he read while finding himself as a gay man, and he also shows us Greenwich Village as seen from his front stoop. The book is not simply a collection of short pieces it’s an autobiography of ideas from one of today’s most lively and popular novelists. Christopher Bram is the author of nine novels, including The Notorious Dr. August, Lives of the Circus Animals, and Exiles in America. His fifth novel, Gods and Monsters, was made into the Oscar winning movie. He grew up in Virginia where he was a paperboy and Eagle Scout and attended the College of William and Mary. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and winner of the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement. He lives in New York.

Eminent Outlaws

In the years following World War II, a small group of gay writers established themselves as literary power players, fueling cultural changes that would resonate for decades to come, and transforming the American literary landscape forever. In Eminent Outlaws, novelist Christopher Bram brilliantly chronicles the rise of gay consciousness in American writing. Beginning with a first wave of major gay literary figures Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Allen Ginsberg, and James Baldwin he shows how despite criticism and occasional setbacks these pioneers set the stage for new generations of gay writers to build on what they had begun: Armistead Maupin, Edmund White, Tony Kushner, and Edward Albee among them. Weaving together the crosscurrents, feuds, and subversive energies that provoked these writers to greatness, Eminent Outlaws is a rich and essential work. With keen insights, it takes readers through fifty years of momentous change: from a time when being a homosexual was a crime in forty nine states and into an age of same sex marriage and the end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.