Carne, La by David Szalay

Carne, La by David Szalay

The 1982 novel of love and recovery of alcoholism back in print.

I wish I lived in Vincent Virga's tragic, glamorous world.

-Edmund White, A Boys Own Story, The Loves

A Comfortable Corner is a novel like no other, alive with hope and struggle, desperation and compassion, loneliness and community. Gay, straight, generational -alcoholism and recovery is an American story. This historically important, socially relevant book is now back in print for the first time since 1982.

I read A Comfortable Corner more than forty years ago. A friend handed it to me when I was trying to change my life. I bombed through its gleeful coziness and was delightedly puzzled that so much beautiful writing (and Vincent Virga is a beautiful writer - just go see for yourself - such passages He does nature and bodies and cityscapes and food, he does everything in a lusty detailed rush in time) can also deliver a message because this is a book probably most of all for someone - well two someones, those interested in recovery and interested in a pitch perfect account of gay life. -from the new introduction by Eileen Myles, Chelsea Girls: A Novel

Come for the luscious mandarin prose, stay for the operatic sweep of lives unraveling and rebuilding in this bejeweled time capsule of a novel. Arch, dazzling, glamorously romantic even at its most sensationally lurid, A Comfortable Corner is by turns a bittersweet remembrance of the post-Stonewall/pre-AIDS Seventies, a harrowing account of the berserker ravages of alcohol, a heartfelt narrative of suffering and the unquenchable human need to love and be loved. A most remarkable book. -Paul Russell, The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov and Boys of Life

If Gaywyck is Virga's Jane Eyre, A Comfortable Corner is his Middlemarch. A Comfortable Corner enfolded me in the love at its heart and the truly gimlet-eyed portrait of its world. -Larry Mellman, The Ballot Boy