Only the Lonely

Asim, gay and 19, is ready to bust out of his rundown steel town, Lackawanna, N.Y., for the University of Michigan. Even the cherished family business — a movie house called The Bethlehem — and its nightly dose of celluloid dreams no longer captivate him. But the bright future he envisions is turned upside down when his father dies and leaves him with the keys to the theater and the job of caring for the old man’s Russian lover. As if he needs another problem, he discovers that his brother Tarik is headed off to some kind of training camp in the Afghanistan desert, and when he returns, he ensnarls Asim and others in a dangerous fanaticism that peaks on September 11, 2001. Gary Zebrun’s first novel, Someone You Know, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. The recipient of Yaddo, MacDowell and Bread Loaf fellowships, he is the Sunday news editor at The Providence Journal, in Rhode Island. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Iowa Review, Sewanee Review, The Believer Book of Writers Talking To Writers, and elsewhere.