Plays Well with Others - Tapa blanda

Written with erotic candour and wild comic energy, Plays Well with Others is an essential fable of our time, the long-awaited great novel of the AIDS pandemic. Hartley Mims arrives in New York in 1980 to embark on an artistic career and establish a brilliant circle of friends. He succeeds at least in gathering a ragtag band of artists - sexually venturesome, gifted, ambitious, and hungry. His circle faces muggings, bad reviews, and the even greater dangers of each other's boundless, toxic ardour. Just as the group is becoming artistically notorious, an unaccountable disease makes its own career move among them. How such colourful egoistic pals close ranks and nurse each other provides the afterword to one long, good, yet interrupted party. The circle's greatest art becomes that most unlikely of human masterpieces: utopian community.

Allan Gurganus lives in North Carolina in the USA. His first book, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. White People, a collection of novellas and stories, was a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. His most recent novel, Plays Well With Others, was published by Faber in 1998.