This book is one of the most extraordinary accounts I have ever read of the AIDS crisis and its impact. It disavows all the usual cant, in favor of two "stories" that recreate the mental world of two survivors. The larger portion of the book is given over to the memories of Odette O'Doyle, a drag queen (though she would never use the phrase) who has just returned from Europe where she scattered the ashes of eight of her dead friends. Her account ranges over the New York gay scene for nearly four decades, with constant insight and an accumulating mass of detail that are, in the end, both funny and deeply moving, in a way that I had hardly anticipated. You may be able to find this book second-hand; it certainly should be back in print.

Time Remaining -- technically a story and a novella which cohere into a whole -- is a masterwork of the most impressive order and a classic on a number of levels. Its various strands include: half a century of haut gay sensibility, from the postwar years to the season of AIDS; the low corruption of American politics; a fireworks display of opinions on opera, poetry, the novel and old movies (or "moompix metaphysics"); and a feat of tough and brilliant writing, sustained at the highest intellectual level. This is sheer text, and not for the lazy, the faint-hearted, or those happy with received truths and well-worn genres. Though its purported story -- a scattering of the ashes of nine dead drag queens, most casualties of AIDS -- suggests an elegy, the impact of reading McCourt in full, ferocious form is nothing short of exhilarating. That this book is out of print is scandalous; that it was barely recognized on publication -- in favor of easier, more easily categorized (or marginalized) gay authors and their books -- is yet more shameful. This is an alkaline, angry turn from the author of Mawrdew Czgzowchwz, the most dazzling novel about opera ever written. But in its idiosyncratic way, Time Remaining gleans the gold.

You can take your Caleb Carrs and your Cold Mountains and whatnot and call them the best of the 1990s, but this wonderful masterwork by the sadly underrated McCourt (no relation to Angela's Arses) is the decade's finest book.

If there is some form of cosmic justice enacted and this book returns to print, you owe it to yourself to read it. Right now, try used bookstores or on-line rare book search engines. It's worth it.

Delancey's Way is not easy to read, filled as it is with sly allusion; you often feel like a last-minute guest at a party where everybody else knows one another and you know nobody. (You know the kind of party I mean.) To some extent you just have to roll with the punches, even when you can't see them land. Still, I found this book dazzling from start to finish. It's a slow read, too. But James McCourt shines a most peculiar light on a most peculiar town, and the results are extraordinary. It had never occurred to me before that the Washington scene cries out for an extended commentary by a drag queen; you see Clinton, Delancey's hero Gore, and the House Republicans in a wholly new way. This novel is terrific fun. It's no wonder that McCourt's "cult following" includes some of the most literate people in America.

The subtitle of this book is "a debriefing," a punning alert to the fact that James McCourt's mind runs along multiple tracks (and never along the shortest distance between two points). In his first novel since 1993's magnificent elegy for the season of AIDS, Time Remaining, McCourt has moved from (usually) sexual politics to politics as usual (and for the most part sexual). Joining such established characters in his fictional/factual oeuvre as narrator Delancey (just one name, like Falconetti or Farinelli), drag philosophe Odette (ne Danny) O'Doyle and diva Vanna Sprezza are some newcomers: Ornette, a gay politicized African-American half in love with the legend of Billy Strayhorn; Anastasia Harrington, an 80s airhead turned DC hostess with the mostest; John Galt (yes, Ayn Rand's wet-cardboard creature), a Senator from the ridge where the West commences; and his exotic page/protege (soon to become his spousal equivalent) Rain, who may or may not be a Shoshone Indian. What there is of a plot recedes into the mists of Foggy Bottom, leaving the foreground open for McCourt's dazzling carnival of allusions, witticisms and trenchant verities. (Who else remembers that "Tangerine" wafted through the windows in Double Indemnity's lethal last encounter?) Ostensibly the chronicle of a campaign to save the piping plover, Delancey's Way is a pungent reverie on the bantam-rooster puffery of the mid-90s Republican "revolution" (McCourt's chapter titles parody the months of the French revolutionary calendar: "Aperture," "Arpege," "Terminal"). Though it's a distillation of just about every book and movie ever made about the American capital (and Capitol), Delancey's Way jettisons all formulas, leaving the acrid McCourt smoke in its spreading wake. Connoisseurs -- of both Washington and of high-strung writing -- will find it toothsome but deadly fun.

John McCourt's The Years Of Bloom: James Joyce In Trieste, 1904-1920 is a remarkable and original contribution to Joycean studies. McCourt was able to acquire information never before published about Joyce's activities in the years he resided in Trieste, and which influenced his career as one of the truly great writers in the English language. Superbly researched, accessibly written, thoroughly documented, and impressively presented, The Years Of Bloom is a major work of outstanding scholarship and a welcome, enduring, seminal contribution which will be part of every college and university reading list and reference collections on the life and writings of James Joyce.

After seeing blurbs on Mawrdew Czgowchwz in two magazines and an on-line newsletter, I said "I have to read this book!" Now I have read it and I didn't. The writing is gorgeous, but too much so. Brobdingnagian aggregations of rare multisyllabic verbiage traipse, saunter, stroll, galumph across the page-sometimes arm-in-arm with an idiomatic epigram or eponym-implying to the ophthalmic interlocutor notions of sylvatic artistry, ecstatic glamour and libidinous merriment. Do you know what I mean, toots?
McCourt's theme is the transcendent power of art. The problem I have with the book is McCourt makes you work too hard. His style and vocabulary get in the way of his message. Achieving transcendence in a spiritual sense takes discipline and stamina. But to be whisked away in the concert hall, all you have to do is listen.
Mawrdew Czgowchcz has engaging characters (with fabulous names) a terrific plot, wicked satire and many fun incidents all of which you will enjoy, if you can pry them out McCourt's thickly gilded sentences. Yes, it is very much like Firbank, but Firbank, for his baroque obtuseness, is still swift and immediate on the page.
I wanted to be engulfed and swept away by Mawrdew, instead I just bobbed along the surface, admiring but not fully appreciating. A little less gorgeousness would serve Mawrdew Czgowchcz much better.

The comparisons that have made between MAWRDEW CZGOWCHWZ and the novels of Ronald Firbank are just... perhaps too much so. Part of the charm of Firbank's novels is their utter singularity; they seem so one-of-a-kind, that they captivate by their. In MAWRDEW, McCourt transplants the heady atmosphere of Firbank's faraway kingdoms and cities to the "Gotham" of the postwar era, but the effect seems a little derivative. Moreover, while McCourt attains the kinds of virtuoso effects of Firbank's prose you keep getting the feeling you're expected to admire the effort rather than be moved by it. There's nothing like the deep-seated anguish that makes the best of Firbank's novels (such as THE FLOWER BENEATH THE FOOT) really transcend their glibness. Almost inevitably the foreword for this edition was written by Wayne Koestenbaum: the book seems to have been written exactly with him in mind as its audience.

It's lovely to have this brilliant novel back in print, easily the best novel on the opera milieu ever published. But it's the maximalist prose that is the true star here--half Firbank, half Joyce, as Wayne Koestenbaum points out in his excellent introduction. I envy anyone reading this for the first time.

"Cobra and Maitreya" contains two novels in one volume. These novels are the work of Severo Sarduy, the Cuban-born writer who left his homeland for France in 1960. This volume is an English edition, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine, with an introduction by James McCourt. Each novel is an elegantly ornate piece of prose; however, in each novel, the ebullient wordplay seems to overwhelm the basics of plot and characterization.

The title character of "Cobra" is a performer in the "Lyrical Theater of Dolls"; Cobra undergoes a torturous physical transformation in the course of the story. The novel also takes us into the world of a gang whose members have names like Scorpion, Tiger, and Totem. The equally bizarre "Maitreya" is a story about Buddhism and sex, among other things.

Sarduy's prose is, at times, witty, outrageous, grotesque, luxurious, hallucinatory, and/or sexually explicit. He occasionally throws in sarcastic messages to the reader in parodic footnotes.... The plots (or lack thereof) did not engage me, and I found the characters difficult to connect with. Nevertheless, adventurous readers may find these novels worthwhile; they are certainly remarkable works of 20th century fiction.