Synopses & Reviews
Newell never really belonged in Pastel, Alabama. Ready for a change, he buys a one-way ticket to New Orleans. The year is 1978 and the rambunctious city beckons with its famous promise of bright lights, excitement, and men everywhere.
Newell makes his way, finding a job in a pornographic bookstore and renting a room in the French Quarter. His good nature, good looks, and a daring stunt in a popular bar make him a quick favorite of the town. Soon he has friends. Some are harmless, like Henry, a pudgy sidekick who's a frequent denizen of the porn shop's movie booths. Others prove more dangerous, like party-boy Mark, Newell's first beau, who has a penchant for recreational drugs. Finally, Newell encounters the volatile Jack, who shows Newell the blackest heart of the city.
Boulevard, Jim Grimsley's fifth novel, reminds us that Grimsley is what Publishers Weekly calls "an accomplished stylist and a complex moralist." He takes one character's dream and reveals what can happen when dreams are fulfilled.
Review
"A rare talent for bringing fresh poetic insight, and rich poetic language, to the most common themes of our literary heritage."
—Chicago Tribune Chicago Tribune
Review
"Grimsley has created remarkably real characters and a New Orleans setting readers can almost smell. He has a way of touching very raw emotions...Highly recommended."
—Library Journal Library Journal
Review
"Grimsley has a steady hand with the beautifully turned sentence, and his mature, sympathetic but rarely sentimental eye for the warp and woof of relationships should please his old fans and gain him some new ones."
—Washington Post Book World
Synopsis
From the award-winning author of Dream Boy and Comfort and Joy, Grimsley's fifth novel is set in New Orleans in the late 1970s when the city beckoned with its promise of bright lights, excitement, and men everywhere.
Synopsis
The year is 1976 and Newell has just moved to New Orleans. His good nature, good looks, and a daring stunt in a popular bar make him a fast favoirte in the French Quarter. As he is lured into the gay subculture of the late 1970s and into the mad abandon of the city's bar scene, Newell must figure out whom to trust—his life will depend on it. In this fierce, poetic, and heartbreaking tale, Grimsley shows us what can happen when one's wildest dreams are fulfilled.
About the Author
Jim Grimsley is the author of four previous novels, among them Winter Birds, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award; Dream Boy, winner of the GLBTF Book Award for literature; My Drowning, a Lila-Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award winner; and Comfort and Joy. He lives in Atlanta and teaches at Emory University.