A delightful collection. I get serious short story burnout when I try reading too many in a row and I've been reading a lot of them lately, but not one of these made my eyes glaze over or my mouth snarl into a cynical complaint about contemporary fiction. Each of these stories was interesting, fresh, and amusing, and nearly all of them surprised or moved me in some way. The standouts were "The Infection Scene," which tells the story of the villainous Lord Alfred Douglas (famous for ruining Oscar Wilde and played on film by too-pretty-to-live Jude Law so that's how I'll always picture him, for better or worse) interwoven with a story about a young man in 1990s San Francisco who wants his boyfriend to infect him with HIV; "Black Box," about a man whose partner is killed in a plane crash; "The Scruff of the Neck," about an elderly woman in Florida who is given surprising information about her family; "Heaped Earth," where a piano player entertains guests at a 1960 Hollywood party; and the title story, in which a man is interviewed by police in Rome after the violent murder of his marble-obsessed ex.Hey, there are only nine stories in this book and I just listed five as "the best"! That means it won. Also, I woke up in the middle of the night last night convinced I was a character in a David Leavitt story -- not a specific one, but I was under the impression that I was a gay man that someone was being weird about leaving their baby with, which sort of seems like something that might happen in his stories, or did at 3:30am anyway.
In this collection of eight short stories and one novella, only two entries stayed with me past the time it took to read them. Although Leavitt is mechanically a masterful writer, for the most part the stories in this collection lacked the intensity and originality that I think are necessary for a really good short stories. The exceptions, the stories that were still bouncing around in my head the day after I read them, were The Infection Scene, a story that weaves a character study of Alfred "Bosie" Douglas with the story of a young man determined to contract HIV that plays off the poison of Bosie's personality (using Bosie's own words from his autobiographies) against the poison of being too romantic; and The Black Box, a story of one man's troublesome journey into the grieving process when his partner is killed in a plane wreck.
