Disorderly Men

Reviews

In New York City half a dozen years before Stonewall, gay men knew who they loved but not yet who they were. Cahill brings their world to life in a big-hearted novel of existential suspense. A closeted banker fences with a blackmailer, an English professor searches for a brutalized lover, and a grocery store manager loses his job and his family, and the reader turns the pages faster and faster to find out not just whether these men make it but also how gays became people of integrity at a time when shame was so deeply nested in laws, institutions, and their own psyches. Cahill paints on a grand canvas the internal, individual revolutions that came before the historic one.---Caleb Crain, author of Overthrow and Necessary Errors What a wonderous world Cahill has created full of pathos and driven by memorable characters and a divinely complex plot. Beyond the historical realities of post-war America, the novel―in extravagant and seductive prose―explores the interior lives of gay men eager for pleasure and desperate to push beyond their own perpetual suffering. Disorderly Men is an absolute triumph.---Amber Dermont, author of The Starboard Sea A teeming multitude of characters and places, Disorderly Men honors the victims of a police raid on a gay bar by showing us their imperfections, their carnality, and their terrible compromises. Mid-century New York has never been so frightening or so beautiful.---Benjamin Nugent, author of Fraternity A moving and deeply engaging portrait of pre-Stonewall New York gay male communities in crisis. Cahill, while exploring a complex web of classes, social positions and status, and professions, deftly uncovers the emotional and political complexity of the period. Disorderly Men vividly imagines the tone and texture of a gay world now almost completely gone.---Michael Bronski, author of A Queer History of the United States Edward Cahill’s wonderfully titled Disorderly Men is a bright, vivid, funny, smart homage to the pre-Stonewall era. A novel at once timeless and timely.---David Leavitt, author of Shelter in Place Edward Cahill’s Disorderly Men is a harrowing period thriller, set in mid-century New York City and its upscale suburbs, that follows its gay male heroes, victims and anti-heroes across a landscape and narrative that feels simultaneously true to its era and somehow outside it, closer to now. Corruption, sex, betrayal and the thrilling surprise of unlikely friendships hide in its dark bars and secret party rooms, its Ivy league classrooms, artists’ studios, Westchester dining rooms, cut-throat corporate offices and crowded apartments. Confidently plotted, its fast-paced scenes rich with glorious and persuasively realized melodrama, Disorderly Men marries the swooning melancholy of Douglas Sirk films and gay pulp fiction to the righteous heartbreak of classic kitchen-sink realism. A striking debut.---Ben Neihart, author of Hey, Joe Faceted and compelling, Edward Cahill’s novel evokes a pre-Stonewall era of subversion, persecution, and growing defiance.---Meg Nola, Foreword Reviews

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Story and style are perfectly aligned in Edward Cahill’s swiftly-paced period piece...utterly absorbing.

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