Mapping the Territory : Selected Nonfiction

Novelist Christopher Bram has been writing essays for twenty-five years. Mapping the Territory, his first collection of nonfiction, ranges through such topics as the power of gay fiction, coming out in the 1970s in Virginia, low-budget filmmaking with friends in New York, and the sexual imagination of Henry James. He describes the heady experience of seeing his novel Gods and Monsters made into an Oscar-winning movie starring Ian McKellen, Brendan Fraser, and Lynn Redgrave; and he discusses why he and his partner of thirty years don't want to get married. Bram looks both into and out of himself in these essays. He revisits the titles he read while finding himself as a gay man, and he also shows us Greenwich Village as seen from his front stoop. The book is not simply a collection of short pieces—it's an autobiography of ideas from one of today’s most lively and popular novelists.Christopher Bram is the author of nine novels, including The Notorious Dr. August, Lives of the Circus Animals, and Exiles in America. His fifth novel, Gods and Monsters, was made into the Oscar-winning movie. He grew up in Virginia where he was a paperboy and Eagle Scout and attended the College of William and Mary. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and winner of the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement. He lives in New York.