The gallery john horne burns

Ihavejust read one of the best books I've ever experienced in my life: John Horne Burns' The Gallery. A lot has been written recently about Burns: The New York Times had a big piece about him, and the recent biography that came out about him, Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns, by David Margolick, has resurrected this strange, basically one-shot writer from the dustbin of literary failure, but what a one-shot it was.

The Gallery was praised when it came out in ; it was a bestseller, and Hemingway described it as the book he wished he had written about World War II. It is easy to understand why: The book is hardly a novel and more a series of vignettes, some almost novella-length, others much shorter, all basically taking place in August , in Naples, Italy, after the Americans had taken Naples but the German war was still raging up north in Tuscany.

Some of the vignettes are small portraits of men and women within the circle of Naples, and others are "wal