Fire Island — BOOKS AND BOYS

Fire Island

**A groundbreaking account of New York's Fire Island, chronicling its influence on art, literature, culture and queer liberation over the past century**
Fire Island, a thin strip of beach off the Long Island coast, has long been a vital space in the queer history of America. Both utopian and exclusionary, healing and destructive, the island is a locus of contradictions, all of which coalesce against a stunning ocean backdrop.

Now, poet and scholar Jack Parlett tells the story of this iconic destination—its history, its meaning and its cultural significance—told through the lens of the artists and creators who sought refuge on its shores. Together, figures as divergent as **Oscar Wilde**, **James Baldwin**, **Carson McCullers**, **Frank O'Hara**, **Patricia Highsmith** and **Jeremy O. Harris** tell the story of a queer space in constant evolution.

Transporting, impeccably researched and gorgeously written, *Fire Island* is a fond and fierce portrait of an iconic American destination and an essential contribution to queer history.

About the Author

Jack Parlett is a writer, poet and scholar. He currently holds a Junior Research Fellowship at University College, Oxford, where he also teaches. His research focuses on 20th and 21st century American literature and culture, with an emphasis on queer writing and questions of gender, sexuality, and race. He completed a PhD in English at Cambridge University, which he adapted as a monograph entitled The Poetics of Cruising: Queer Visual Culture from Whitman to Grindr, published by the University of Minnesota Press in February 2022.

His next book, Fire Island: Love, Loss and Liberation in an American Paradise, will be published by Granta Books (UK) and Hanover Square Press (US) in May 2022.

His debut poetry chapbook, Same Blue, Different You, was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2020. His essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Boston Review, Literary Hub, Poetry London and elsewhere. He lives in Oxford.