Author Andrew Holleran, the pen name of Eric Garber, is a legendary literary voice of the post-Stonewall generation. That earlier work rhapsodically recalled the sexual explorations and impossible romances of gay men who got caught up in the pre-AIDS bacchanalia that was Manhattan in the ’70s. The novel is the first in 13 years from Holleran, whose 1978 seminal classic Dancer From the Dance turned him into one of the major figures of queer literature in the post-Stonewall generation. That sums up the conflicting mix of alienation, despair, and vibrant engagement evoked by the unnamed narrator at the center of The Kingdom of Sand - an unattached gay man in his 60s who is living in his deceased parents’ home in a rural lakefront town between Gainesville and Jacksonville and gradually losing the aging friends and connections that sustain him in his loneliness. In his new novel, Andrew Holleran writes, in a scene set at a North Florida Thanksgiving dinner attended by older gay men, “There is a delicate undercurrent beneath get-togethers among singles on holidays that mingles the comfort of having a friend to relieve your isolation with the realization that the two of you have nobody else.”
