BOOK REVIEWS
Joseph Allen Boone.
FURNACE CREEK
“With lyric beauty, welcome frankness, and rare emotional urgency, Boone reimagines Dickens’ Great Expectations in the American South . . . with a queer perspective and countless new and illuminating approaches. Exquisite prose and a storyteller’s elan.”
Publishers Weekly“Boone’s prose is lyrical and inventive, merging Dickensian wit and texture with a dash of Southern gothic. The characters are delicately drawn and elegantly complicated.”
Kirkus Reviews“A page-turning novel, a spirited American retelling of an English classic . . . . Boone brings both worlds vividly alive with his ebullient prose. A joyously ambitious debut!”
Marianne Wiggins, Pulitizer and National Book Award nominee for Evidence of Things Unseen“Furnace Creek has everything brilliant novels have . . . It is also wickedly funny, that rare novel full of charming humor and sharp cultural commentary at every turn.”
Dana Johnson, Flannery O’Connor Award for Break Any Woman Down“A sweeping, Gothic tale of sex, race, and a young man’s education. I was totally entertained and, most of all, seduced.”
Viet Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer“A playful reimagining of Dickens, a tautly plotted thriller, a beautifully observed coming of age story: Furnace Creek . . . seizes you from the beginning and refuses to let you go.”
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, author of Becoming Dickens and The Turning Point: The Year that Changed Charles Dickens and the World“The love of literature hinges not just on beautiful writing but on an awareness that the stories of the past have a lot to teach us in the present. By transposing Dickens into our own era, Boone demonstrates just that—and also shows that those stories belong to all of us, regardless of our gender, sexuality, or time in history.”
Lewis di Simone, Gay and Lesbian Review International“The richness of [its] characters makes Furnace Creek work brilliantly. But more: Boone gives them stories that compel the reader to see them as individuals in a specific time and place. Boone’s writing . . . is at times lyrical, memorable, and always in service to the story.”
Barry Qualls, Southern Review of Literature“No one can outdo Dickens when it comes to creating characters that hold; but what Dickens couldn’t do that Boone can is give [Great Expectations] a modern twist by exploring the inner life of his teenage protagonist, which is as turbulent as the times . . . A wonderful novel with psychological depth to match a period in American history that was both stormy and exhilarating. Boone is a masterful writer.”
Molly Engelhardt, Books Cover to Cover“No single review could possibly encompass the abundance of lives and life underway in [this] novel—nor should anyone wish it to. That’s why we read books like this one: to get happily lost in their capacious, prodigious pages. A satisfyingly substantial libation built upon a potent spirit.”
Greg Bills, author of Fearful Symmetry and Consider This Home
The Homoerotics of Orientalism
“Orientalism will never be the same after Boone’s extraordinary book, which . . . with its staggering erudition and critical finesse courageously recasts the stark divide of Occident and Orient . . . and it does so in the form of a critical gift―a book of utmost generosity, judiciousness, and political imagination― that carries its own charge of love.”
-Jennifer Wicke, University of Virginia“A masterpiece and rare achievement . . . the entire concept of Orientalism will have to be totally rethought following Boone’s book.”
-Moshe Shluhovsky, The Hebrew University“Once every decade or so, a book appears that revolutionizes the field of GLBT studies . . . [this book] will permeate the wider GLBT intellectual landscape. Every reader will benefit.”
-Gay And Lesbian Review Worldwide“A veritable tour de force. Groundbreaking.”
-Gay And Le-Sahar Amer, University of Sydneysbian Review WorldwideLIBIDINAL CURRENTS
"Boone has a marvellous, almost elegiac, sense of a complex, transatlantic choir of bodies and texts, from Bronte to Lessing--a choir that sings, under Boone's tutelage, one unstoppably liquid, sonorous, sexual note, to which all serious lovers of literary modernity will want to lend their ear."
Wayne Koestenbaum, CUNY-Graduate Center"A brilliant and visionary study of the erotic politics of modernism, Libidinal Currents is symphonic. Sexuality resounds at its center, but . . . sexuality also changes shape, its presentations the meeting-place for trysts among psychology, sociology, metaphysics, and history."
Patricia Yaeger, University of Michigan"As an ardent and theoretically informed reader, Boone tracks the unruly flow of desire to show how the sexual and textual, the coercive and subversive, co-mingle and call into question monolithic metanarratives about the politics of modernism. A stunning contribution."
Susan Stanford Friedman, University of Wisconsin, Madison"A big book in every way. Overflowing with insight, inventiveness, and erudition."
Joseph Litvak, Tufts University"Like Boone's previous work, this is a dense and scholarly account, wide-ranging in materials and magisterial in tone . . . a sweeping revision of modernism."
David Van Leer, rev. in JOURNAL OF AMERICAN HISTORY
TRADITION COUNTER TRADITION
“A magisterial analysis of the marriage plot’s role in the shaping of British and American fiction over the past three centuries. Elegantly written, encyclopedic in scope, and scrupulously attentive to historical and textual detail, Tradition Counter Tradition will have a lasting place in literary histories of the novel.”
-Elizabeth Abel, rev. in NOVEL“A superb and important book, provocative and persuasive. . . I rejoice in a book by a male critic drawing on his own situation and experience for the authority with which he writes about gender.”
-Margaret Homans, Yale University“A very ambitious piece of work, and Boone carries it off with great brio . . . exemplary of a new critical mode.”
-Peter Brooks, Yale University“An enlightened, and enlightening, piece of work.”
-Tony Tanner, Cambridge University“Brilliant and far-reaching. Boone joins (by conjoining) Ian Watt and Wayne Booth as a leading theoretician of the novel.”
-Evelyn J. Hinz, rev. in Nineteenth-Century LiteratureENGENDERING MEN
"A number of powerful and interesting articles offer new insights into both methodology and particular texts. The best essays are full of vital insights and ideas that will allow reader new access to some key works of literature. There is much to welcome in this collection."
-Choice"In its way, [Boone's introduction] is a brilliant thought. It opens up the fantastic possibility of a critical revisitation of the entire corpus of world literature by men reading as 'engendered' men."
-Times Literary Supplement"Remarkably sophisticated but lucid. This superb volume will remain an invaluable resource in getting us to that 'next phase' . . . [of] gender/sexuality studies."
-Marlon Ross, rev. in Signs"The difficulties, contradictions, and knot-making complexities of living with and through the implications of this dialectic between desire and realistic possibility are vividly illustrated in the essays in Engendering Men."
-Jeffrey Weeks, rev. in Victorian Studies
Queer Frontiers
“This wide-ranging anthology takes us unexpected places and makes provocative connections. Queer Frontiers is a lively and stimulating contribution to ongoing cultural debates.”
-Neil Miller, author of Out of the Past“In their sophisticated attention not only to sexuality but also to bodies, genders, identities, and the social spaces that structure how sexuality plays itself out, this host of fresh voices from the queer frontier provides an encouraging preview of the shape of queer studies in the decades ahead.”
-Susan Stryker, Stanford University“The manifold futures as seen through the eyes of [these queer] scholars is thought provoking, in some cases startling, and well worth your time to read.”
-Lambda Literary ReviewFull Reviews For Furnace Creek
Suzanne Keen, "Dickens for the Civil Rights-Era South: On Joseph Boone's 'Furnace Creek.'" Los Angeles Review of Books
September 30, 2022
Barry Qualls, "Furnace Creek': Lyrical, Memorable. and Character-Driven." Southern Review of Books
September 14, 2022
Lewis DeSimone. "A Pip for the '60s." The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide
May 2, 2022
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“A funny, moving, and true rendition of everybody’s story: surviving our childhoods, which can be uniquely challenging if you’re Southern, and queer. Boone is a natural novelist, and Furnace Creek is a genuine accomplishment.”
Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize for The Hours