A perfect summer read. Full of lust and heat, flush with beauty and desire, Dancer From the Dance includes some of the best sentences ever written about gay nightlife, Fire Island, camp humor, and cruising. If nothing else, do it for the disco.
— Landon"An astonishingly beautiful book. The best gay novel written by anyone of our generation." — Harper's magazine
One of the most important works of gay literature, this haunting, brilliant novel is a seriocomic remembrance of things past -- and still poignantly present. It depicts the adventures of Malone, a beautiful young man searching for love amid New York's emerging gay scene. From Manhattan's Everard Baths and after-hours discos to Fire Island's deserted parks and lavish orgies, Malone looks high and low for meaningful companionship. The person he finds is Sutherland, a campy quintessential queen -- and one of the most memorable literary creations of contemporary fiction.
Hilarious, witty, and ultimately heartbreaking, Dancer from the Dance is truthful, provocative, outrageous fiction told in a voice as close to laughter as to tears.
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
“A life changing read for me. Describes a New York that has completely disappeared and for which I longed—stuck in closed-on-Sunday's London.” — Rupert Everett
“The first gay novel everybody read. . . .It’s the story of youth and beauty and money and drugs. But overarchingly...the story of a new queer future.” — Michael Cunningham, New York Times Magazine
“Dancer From the Dance holds a sacred place in gay literary history for its seductive glimpse of post-Stonewall and pre-AIDS New York City.” — The Nation
"A hymn to gay liberation in the city, and to male beauty." — Darryl Pinckney, New York Times Style magazine, T
"A book of spirited elegance and energy." — New York magazine
"One of the most famous works of gay literature." — New York Times
"Set in New York in a pre-AIDS era, Holleran brilliantly captures a generation of men for whom hedonism is never-ending, while desire, loneliness and a restless wish for love continually jostle." — British Vogue