Love and Death on Long Island — Gilbert Adair

A reserved British intellectual falls obsessively in love with a young American heartthrob, in this witty and poignant “tour de force” (Literary Review).
 
When he wanders into the wrong theater and finds himself watching the wretched teen-pic Hotpants College II, cerebral British author Giles De'Ath becomes romantically obsessed with dreamboat Ronnie Bostock. Giles's infatuation drives him to the unthinkable: he reads American fan magazines and watches movies with titles like Tex Mex and Skid Marks. And finally, he travels to Long Island, intent on meeting Ronnie in the flesh.
 
The basis for the hit independent film starring Jason Priestley and John Hurt, Love and Death on Long Island is a brilliant and heartrending update of Thomas Mann's early twentieth-century novella Death in Venice. It offers both a poignant meditation on passion, and “a very funny portrait of an extraordinarily unworldly academic's introduction to the dizzyingly incomprehensible realm of popular culture” (Nick Hornby).
 
“Brief, pure, intense . . . The writing is masterly, the conjuring of contrasting worlds a triumph.” -- The Financial Times