Books like After Camus — picked by fans

This is a big ambitious book with a huge literary and emotional payoff.

It’s set in Chicago, a town I don’t know well during the AIDS epidemic, an experience that has stayed with me. It’s also set in Paris, a place we all love to read about, in the art world, where I like to linger. I don’t always appreciate a multiple timeline structure; here, however, it really enriches the plot, heightens the stakes, and amplifies the theme of love within tragedy.

Every character is well-drawn and makes a lasting impression as you jump into not only a community in crisis, but also a world of visual art, found families, mortality, and memory. It’s a stunningly sublime story about the experiences and people who forever change us.

I loved Waltzing With The Dragons for its autobiographical sense of history and description of mother/daughter bonds that are truly universal. 

The story begins in 1922 with Ly, the daughter of one of the last Mandarins in north Vietnam, who flees an arranged marriage at thirteen to stay with her father’s friends, a French couple, and lives through the WWII Japanese occupation, finally fleeing to the South where she falls in love with a French Army doctor and gives birth to a daughter, Mai-Tam, in 1952. 

Mai-Tam, who is Eurasian and never feels she belongs, grows up in the shadow of the American-Vietnam war. The novel ends in 1967, preserving a mother-daughter kinship that sustains migration and separation. 

Of the very, very many books about writing and reading, Alexander Chee’s book of essays is among the best. His prose is honest and soul-baring and his descriptions are the kind you wish you’d thought of. The collection is basically a coming-of-age story divided into anecdotal episodes—as an exchange student wanting love in Mexico, working at a famous gay bookstore in San Francisco while AIDS decimated his community, and time in academia. Chee has an affection for his readers and students that is engaging. He’s also a great Twitter presence and like Jacob, also a looker. At a Christmas party we both attended, we discovered we are Leos, so, we’re basically bonded for life. 

In We Are Having This Conversation Now, Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr blow up the conventions of academic work on epidemics.

In a series of thirteen short dialogues they reflect as activists, media-makers, and scholars on the history, present, and future of AIDS. The reflections on AIDS-related culture and conversation they share, will spark for readers critical questions about how personal experiences, community, cultural production, and interpersonal relations come together.

Doing this kind of reflective work is particularly important now, as we need to begin to understand not only HIV/AIDS, but how it impacts the experience of living amidst other viral pandemics including COVID-19. 

I was involved in the HIV epidemic from the very beginning as President of the Hemophilia Association of New York.

The behind-the-scenes information that Dr. Fauci provides helped inform me and remind me of what we – and the world – went through. During the COVID epidemic, Dr. Fauci had to manage the crazy political system more than he ever had to, and he is very frank about what he experienced.

The book and its details made me grateful for his lifetime of wonderful work.

Scientists now know that the AIDS virus, HIV-1, entered the human population much earlier than is commonly thought—back around 1908, give or take a margin of error, and via a single spillover from a chimpanzee into a human, probably by blood exposure when a chimp was killed and butchered for food. Pepin’s book illuminates how the virus might then, slowly and quietly at first, have spread from a forest in southeastern Cameroun, down tributaries of the Congo River to major cities such as Brazzaville and Leopoldville (now Kinshasa), and from there to the world. Pepin’s work was vastly helpful to me when I assembled my own account of that story, included in my own books.

Jill Nalder is one of the great heroes of the AIDS crisis in eighties Britain. Her story features in the TV series It’s A Sin. This is her memoir and it’s an uplifting and heartbreaking read. Jill is one of those miraculous allies for gay men who fought to get more information about AIDS distributed more widely. It’s thanks to people like her that AIDS is no longer a death sentence.

I’m going to say right off the top that this book is not well written: it’s turgid and florid and hard to follow. But it’s also recent, unlike most of the books on my list, and it’s the first comprehensive accounting of PEPFAR, the extraordinary US intervention into the African pandemic.

It’s impossible to understand the huge shift in the dynamic of the pandemic without understanding how massively George Bush’s decision to support HIV treatment in Africa changed – well, everything – and Bass is the first writer to try to really dig into that story.

Oh, Was, how I love your relentlessly bleak, depressing sadness.

This is a strangely inventive novel that twines reality and fantasy into a brutal, desolate, yet gorgeous story of pain and survival. Told from the points of view of numerous characters, each story is tethered in some way to The Wizard of Oz, that venerable fable about good versus evil in the search for home.

Ryman introduces us to a main trio of characters whose lives are all equally harrowing–Dorothy Gael (the imagined inspiration for The Wizard of Oz heroine and the victim of familial sexual abuse), Frances Gumm (who becomes the tragic Judy Garland), and Jonathan (an actor experiencing AIDS-related dementia)–whose stories he intricately weaves together like a master craftsman. And while the novel is not a “happy” read by any stretch of the imagination, what has stayed with me throughout the past thirty years is its… show more.

Some of the worst memoir-writing advice I’ve ever heard is, “Don’t write in the midst of emotional turmoil.”  If Mark Doty had listened, readers would have never received the gift of Heaven’s Coast. No doubt this memoir began as a journaled record of Doty losing his beloved partner to AIDS. 

His record of love, loss, and grief packs a punch because it’s so raw. It has lasting power because Doty took time to revise, adding eloquence, perspective, and insight. This is also a great model for integrating reflection into a story.