Gay Men's Book Group at COH: Anyone's Ghost

Gay Men's Book Group-Chicago is a free, open monthly book discussion group welcoming male-identified individuals of all ages who are interested in reading and discussing gay-related literature, both fiction and non-fiction. Books to be discussed are selected by the group and posted on their Facebook page and via their newsletter email.

July's selection is Anyone's Ghost by August Thompson:

An extraordinary debut novel in which the transforming love and friendship between two young men during one unforgettable teenage summer in rural New England haunts them into adulthood. It took three car crashes to kill Jake.Theron David Alden is there for the first the summer they meet in rural New Hampshire, when he’s fifteen and anxious, and Jake’s seventeen and a natural; then six years later in New York City, those too-short, ecstatic, painful nights that change both their lives forever—the end of the dream and the longing for the dream and the dream itself, all at once. Theron is not there for the third crash. And yet, their story contains so much joy and the glorious, stupid simplicity of a boyhood joke; the devastation of insecurity; the way a great song can distill a universe; the limits of what we can know about each other; the mysterious, porous, ungraspable fault line between yourself and the person you love better than yourself; the beautiful, toxic elixir of need and hope and want. Brimming with rare, radioactive talent, August Thompson has written a love story that is electrically alive and exquisitely tuned. In the words of Jonathan Safran Foer, “This book will make you cry.”

Join us at the Center on Halsted (2nd floor) for a discussion of this thought-provoking book.