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AUTHOR: Michael Cunningham
PUBLISHER: Picador
LANGUAGE: English
DATE: 1998
PAGES: 343
ISBN: 9780312202316
AWARDS: Stonewall Book Award Nominee for Literature (1991), Lambda Literary Award Nominee for Gay Men’s Fiction (1990)
A Home at the End of the World
by Michael Cunningham
From Michael Cunningham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours, comes this widely praised novel of two boyhood friends: Jonathan, lonely, introspective, and unsure of himself; and Bobby, hip, dark, and inarticulate. In New York after college, Bobby moves in with Jonathan and his roommate, Clare, a veteran of the city’s erotic wars. Bobby and Clare fall in love, scuttling the plans of Jonathan, who is gay, to father Clare’s child. Then, when Clare and Bobby have a baby, the three move to a small house upstate to raise “their” child together and, with an odd friend, Alice, create a new kind of family.
INCLUSION CRITERIA
A main character (Bobby) is attracted to people of multiple genders.
QUOTES
“My other half-lover’s name was Erich. He and I had sex, though he did not inspire in me the urgency or the sorrowful, exhilarating edge that, combined with desire, must add up to love. I kept my head with Erich. To be honest, since leaving Cleveland I had never loved a man I’d slept with—I hadn’t come close to the feeling, though I’d gotten to know dozens of bodies in their every mood and condition. My own capacity for devotion focused actually on Clare and hypothetically on certain men I saw walking the streets of the city: strong-looking men who didn’t aspire to conventional fame or happiness, who cleaved the air with definitive thoughtlessness. I looked as unobtrusively as possible at punks in black army boots, sullen Italian boys, and tough long-haired kids from small towns who had come to New York expecting their criminal reputations to hold.”
― from A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham
“I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.”
― from A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham
“We’d hoped for love of a different kind, love that knew and forgave our human frailty but did not miniaturize our grander ideas of ourselves.”
― from A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham