"The Torturer's Wife" by Thomas Glave

Author of the acclaimed story collection Whose Song?, award-winning Thomas Glave is known for his stylistic brio and courageous explorations into the heavily mined territories of race and sexuality. Here he expands and deepens his lyrical experimentation in stories that focus—explicitly and allegorically—on the horrors of dictatorships, war, anti-gay violence, the weight of traumatized memory, secret fetishes, erotic longing, desire, and intimacy.

Thomas Glave is an O. Henry award-winning author and was named a Village Voice Writer on the Verge in 2001. He is the author of Whose Song? and Other Stories, Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent (winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Nonfiction), and editor of Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles. He is the 2008-2009 Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Professor in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Praise for The Torturer's Wife:


"The Torturer's Wife is one of the most interesting American books I [have] read in the last years. It is not the usual publisher's product, but a literary text that incites the reader to become a conscious and seduced re-reader."

—Juan Goytisolo, author of State of Siege and A Cock-Eyed Comedy



Praise for Thomas Glave:

"Glave's disruption of form is a powerful metaphor for sexual, racial, and geopolitical disjunctions. Glave is a gifted stylist . . . blessed with ambition, his own voice and an impressive willingness to dissect how individuals actually think and behave."

—New York Times Book Review


"Thomas Glave walks the path of such greats in American literature as Richard Wright and James Baldwin . . . He cuts to the bone of what it means to be black in America, white in America, gay in America, and human in the world at large."

—Gloria Naylor, author of The Women of Brewster Place


"What a writer! What a book! Glave is a brilliant writer of startlingly fresh prose . . . His stories are intricate tapestries of life rendered through a triumphant act of the imagination.”

—Clarence Major, author of One Flesh

Publisher City Lights Publishers

ISBN-10 0872864669

Publication Date December 2008

List Price $15.95

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