Synopses & Reviews
Praise for Winter Birds:
--Winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters
--Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award
"I have rarely read anything as powerful as Winter Birds. I wanted to steal it and pretend it was mine, or go on tour reading it out loud...This man got it right, he got it perfectly right."--Dorothy Allison
"I think I will not read another novel this year. Nothing else can be as vivid, as awful and awesome as this enormously powerful book."--Max Steele
"Reminiscent of Faulkner or Caldwell."--Booklist
"Southern landscape viewed from a gay perspective with the bitterness of memory but also with the unwavering, unsentimental love--all this, of course, is Dorothy Allison territory. I can't think of a soldier tribute."--The New Yorker
Praise for Dream Boy:
--Winner of the GLBTF Book Award for Fiction from the ALA
--Nominated for the Lambda Award for Fiction
"Grimsley clearly understands the pain and confusion of budding love...in this singular display of literary craftmanship."--Publishers Weekly
"My admiration for Jim Grimsley's power is widened and deepened."--Reynolds Place
Praise for My Drowning:
--A Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award winner
"My Drowning is magnificent, just masterful. So much is not said and yet we know everything."--Ann Patchett
"Rural poverty can turn people vicious too, as readers discovered in Erksine Caldwell's 1932 best seller, 'Tobacco Road'...My Drowning eloquently carries on this dark tradition."--The New York Times Book Review
"Grimsley's delicate prose and defiant resilience of his protagonist make reading his work a rich, gratifying experience."--Publishers Weekly, starred review
Synopsis
Ford McKinney leads a charmed life: he's a young doctor possessing good looks, good breeding, and money. He comes from an old Savannah family where his parents, attentive to his future, focus their energies on finding their son--their golden boy--a girl to marry. But how charmed is this life when Ford's own heart suspects that he is not meant to spend his life with a woman? His suspicions are confirmed when he meets Dan Crell.
Dan is a quiet man with a great voice. Behind the tempered facade of the shy hospital administrator is a singer who can transform a room with his soaring voice, leaving his listeners in awe and reverence. Ford catches one such Christmas concert and his life is never quite the same; he is touched in a place he keeps hidden, forbidden. When Ford and Dan begin to explore the limits of their relationship, Dan's own secrets are exposed--and his mysterious and painful childhood returns to haunt him.
In Comfort and Joy Jim Grimsley finds a marriage between the stark and stunning pain of his prize-winning Winter Birds and the passion of critically acclaimed Dream Boy. In this, his fourth novel, he considers pressing questions. How does a man reconcile the child he was raised to be with the man that he truly is? What happens when an adult has to choose between his parents and a lover?
Synopsis
Young. Handsome. Rich. Doctor. Quite a dream boy, Ford McKinney is the perfect catch. Ford's family wants him home for the holidays. They have picked out a girl for him to marry. But Ford has news, too: he's fallen for an administrator at the hospital, a man by the name of Dan Crell.
To complicate things further, Dan and Ford come from opposite sides of the tracks. Dan's mother lives in a trailer at the edge of a cemetery where she is the caretaker; Ford's family lives in the best house on the best street of Savannah. Dan's mother knows her son well, knows that he will never marry, and she just wants to see him happy, and loved. To Ford even the idea of telling his family about his relationship seems impossible. Sometimes he can't believe it himself. And wouldn't you know it's Christmas when these two families reveal their true natures.
Comfort & Joy proves what we all suspect: going home for the holidays is never easy, whether you go alone or decide to bring a date--especially if that date is your gay lover. Grimsley triumphs in his new novel in which two unlikely lovers must reconcile what is expected of them with what they know in their hearts is right.
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.