THE MAGIC SHOW PRESS unveils

A Friend of Dorothy’s

Playwright Richard Willett’s
Controversial Lost Novel of The Eighties

A Friend of Dorothy’s, a coming of age novel set at the start of the AIDS epidemic in 1980s New York City is available now from local bookstores and online booksellers.

ISBN: 979-8-9923398-0-2 (hardcover)
$27.99 (usa) $39.99 (can) £21.99 (uk) $43.99 (aus)
ISBN: 979-8-9923398-1-9 (paperback)
$17.99 (usa) $25.99 (can) £16.99 (uk) $27.99 (aus)
ISBN:  979-8-9923398-2-6 (e-book)
$ 6.99 (usa) $11.99 (can) $12.99 (aus)

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CLICK HERE to order paperback, hardcover, or ebook editions of A Friend of Dorothy’s from an online bookstore.

CLICK HERE to order the hardcover edition directly through our distributor (US and UK only).

CLICK HERE to order the paperback edition directly through our distributor (US and UK only).

CLICK HERE to order the e-book edition from The Magic Show Press (distributed via Gumroad/Bookfunnel.)

Richard Willett wrote A Friend of Dorothy’s when he was in his twenties. Excerpts appeared in the legendary gay literary magazine Christopher Street and in Permafrost at the University of Alaska, as well as being short-listed for New American Library’s Men on Men: Best New Gay Fiction. But the novel dismayed just as many editors, who especially clutched their pearls over its overtly sexual final chapter, and the book itself never found a home. Until now.  

“We have all the time in the world,
my sweet beautiful man.”

It was the ending that scared off even gay editors in the early 1990s. An intimate victory dance of overt gay male sexuality at a time when not just silence = death, but for many sex = death. Now, perhaps, readers will be more open to celebrating it.

It’s 1986 in New York City and 27-year-old Eric Summerfield knows that “yuppies” are supposed to be obnoxious, easily dismissed, but he envies the clarity of their delusions, their seeming ability to keep mortality at bay. He yearns, in fact, to be one of them. The catch: He’s no Wall Street insider, but instead the underpaid employee of a Canadian chain bookstore in Midtown Manhattan, a Canuck himself, and gay, and AIDS suddenly seems to be everywhere, including in the body of his flamboyant friend and coworker Dale, who inexplicably singles out a reluctant Eric to be his chief caregiver. It’s an experience that will change both of them.

Moving back and forth across time and place from youth in the 1960s and ’70s–Eric’s in Vancouver, Dale’s on a farm in Kansas—to the pressure cooker of New York in the gay eighties, A Friend of Dorothy’s is also a timeless, universal coming of age novel, in which the crucible of illness compels one young man to reach for something greater.

STARRED REVIEW: “Willett depicts Dale’s illness in unflinching detail but avoids maudlin sentimentality—almost until the end, Dale remains a spirited, bitchy, shrewd, and charismatic man, and his and Eric’s recollections paint a vibrant portrait of gay life in the late 1970s. Writing with a hangdog wit (‘Was it maybe true that the only way Eric could feel relaxed at a party was if the host had a terminal illness?’), Willett manages the difficult task of making an AIDS story funny; then, through a skillful accretion of matter-of-fact details, he vividly conveys the pathos of Dale’s decline and Eric’s fumbling, tender response. Readers will be laughing through their tears.”—Kirkus Reviews

EDITOR’S PICK: “Although A FRIEND OF DOROTHY’S was completed in 1991 and captures the emotional turmoil of a gay man’s sexual awakening during the height of AIDS with nuance and immediacy, playwright Willett’s urgent novel doesn’t easily fit into genre conventions. . . . But his greatest strength is depicting the pain and bliss of male bodies: Eric’s torturous childhood treatment for scoliosis; Dale’s physical and mental decline, rendered as a tableau of escalating humiliations; and a chapter explicitly detailing Eric’s encounters with a lover committed to showing him pleasure. Even though Willett’s protagonist is awash in fear, after a lifetime of thwarted and misdirected desire, sexual fulfillment is a revelation, and he comes to epitomize the mind/body disconnect that can lead people to deny their full humanity. TAKEAWAY: Powerful novel of queer self-discovery amid the AIDS crisis in 1980s New York.”—Publishers Weekly’s BookLife

“Nothing can have prepared you for the wit and insight, the eccentricity and inspiring optimism with which this consistently surprising young writer depicts a year at the heart of his generation’s greatest calamity.”—Joseph Pintauro, author of Cold Hands and Raft of the Madusa

“There is a knowingness, a sense of timing, a compassion and forgiveness under all the action, character to character. What Richard Willett has—in abundance—is love for the people he is chronicling and, by recording, saving.”—Allan Gurganus, author of The Practical Heart, Plays Well with Others, and Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

“The writing is poignant, realistic and fine; the reader is pierced and instantly seduced by the characters’ appeal and immediacy.”—Harlan Greene, author of The German Officer’s Boy, What the Dead Remember, and Why We Never Danced the Charleston

Interested in other books, plays, films and projects involving Richard Willett? Visit richardwillettwriter.com. Or…