Award-winning author Andrew W. M. Beierle bravely writes for a market PW calls "small and finicky", but he does it so well, it's possible that he might just crack open a few minds outside the pigeon hole into which the monkey chorus has tried to cram him. Beierle is about to follow up his acclaimed first novel, The Winter Of Our Discothèque (best title ever, no?), with a book about conjoined twins, one of whom is gay. First Person Plural is being hailed by early reviewers as "utterly original," "intricately imagined," and "that rarity in fiction, a novel of ideas". Due out from Kensington this month(which frankly alters everything I thought I knew about Kensington!) it's been named a September 2007 Main Selection of the InsightOut Book Club. In his essay "Freaks 'R' Us: Inhabiting Alien Characters", Beierle explains a little of the process he used to get into the heads of Owen and Porter Jamison:
In First Person Plural, I wanted to use my two-headed protagonists as a metaphor for the alienation I felt as a gay man. Despite the progress gay people have made since I came out at the age of eighteen in 1969, I remained constantly aware of feeling different. And I felt that no matter how hard I tried to fit in (short of going back into the closet), I would always remain as obviously different as if I . . . well, had two heads. Voilá.
Visit Andrew online to catch up on the book buzz and read chapter one.
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