Time Remaining — James Mccourt

Well, it just sings. -Susan Sontag'Drugs, dick, disco, and dish-remember?' That's how the drag queen Miss Mae Mae describes the good times in James McCourt's 1993 novel, Time Remaining. She is on her deathbed, clutching a stuffed bear, and she marvels at how suddenly those words have been replaced by 'dysentery, dementia, despair, and death.' Miss Mae Mae's final quip is relayed by Odette O'Doyle, a 'polymath drag-queen diva, ' to Daniel Delancey, an orphaned performance artist, as they ride the midnight train to Montauk. Odette and Delancey are the sole survivors of a raucous group of drag queens called the Eleven Against Heaven, which AIDS has decimated. Odette has just returned from depositing the ashes of the Eleven in various European bodies of water: Miss Mae Mae in the Rhine, Miss Faith Healy in the Liffey, Miss Charity Ward 'upon still waters in the fjord at Ålesund. As she recounts the rites for Delancey, she immerses us in stories of the Eleven, and surfaces a singular history of mid-century queer New York. -The New YorkerMcCourt is that rarest of contemporary American authors-a true iconoclast, a devoted high stylist, and a holder of the unfashionable opinion that prose is a natural extrovert and beauty that deserves the brightest polish, the best accessories, the most extravagant costumes. -Dennis Cooper, author of Closer and FriskWhat makes Time Remaining an extraordinary animal among so many, varied gay books that came to life in the 1970s, 80s and 90s? It's a celebration of the survival instincts that define gay life. The use of dark humor is the building and defense of our semantic canon which results in an aggressively earned comfort with the world. -Tim Young, from his introduction to the new edition James McCourt is the author of multiple works of fiction and nonfiction. He is best known for his acclaimed 1971 debut novel Mawrdew Czgowchwz (pronounced Mardu Gorgeous) which is currently available with the New York Review Books Classics imprint. Queer Street: The Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947-85, published in 2003, was identified by The New York Times as an heroically imaginative account of gay metropolitan culture, an elegy and an apologia for a generation. Tim Young has been thinking and writing about the role of literature and music in the narrative of life for many decades. In addition to a series of essays on popular culture for Design Observer, he has contributed work for The Yale Review.