Family Dancing by David Leavitt

Family Dancing by David Leavitt

Thirty years ago, David Leavitt first appeared on the literary scene with a gutsy story collection that stunned readers and reviewers. Just twenty-three, he was hailed as a prodigy of sorts: "remarkably gifted" (The Washington Post), with "a genius for empathy" (The New York Times Book Review) and "a knowledge of others' lives . . . that a writer twice his age might envy" (USA Today). "Regardless of age," wrote the New York Times, "few writers so effortlessly achieve the sense of maturity and earned compassion so evident in these pages."

In "Territory," a well-intentioned, liberal mother, presiding over her local Parents of Lesbians and Gays chapter, finds her acceptance of her son's sexuality shaken when he arrives home with a lover. In the title story, a family extended through divorce and remarriage dances together at the end of a summer party-in the recognition that they are still bound by the very forces that split them apart. Tender and funny, these stories reveal the intricacies and subtleties of the dances in which we all engage.

David Leavitt's fiction has been shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Award and has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the LA Times Fiction Prize. His work has appeared in journals such as the New Yorker, the New York Times, Harper's, and Vogue, among others. He is a professor of English at the University of Florida and the editor of the literary magazine Subtropics. He lives in Gainesville, Florida.