The Beautiful Room is Empty

First edition. 8vo. Pp. [x], 227, [3]. Quarter-black cloth over black paper boards, spine lettered in gilt, upper board blocked in gilt and lettered in black, deckled fore-edges. Jacket design by Chip Kidd with blurbs to rear panel by John Ashbery, Doris Grumbach and Cynthia Ozick.

Signed and inscribed by author to title page.

His fifth novel. A semi-autobiographical coming-out novel, charting the unnamed narrator's progress from the repressed atmosphere of 1950s Midwest to the 1969 Stonewall Riots. The second volume in the trilogy which began with A Boy's Own Story (1982), concluding with The Farewell Symphony (1997). "An impressive novel." –Washington Post book World