"Profoundly sad, elegant and insightful. . . . Holleran's trademark prose-lush, carefully cadenced and keenly observed-creates a mesmerizingly claustrophobic world."-Publishers Weekly Andrew Holleran's classic novel of loneliness, obsessive desire, unfulfilled dreams, and the loss of youth, set in the mid-1990s amid the ravaging AIDS crisis. Forty-seven, gay, and alone, Lark leaves behind his youth and dreams in New York City to care for his dying...

The kingdom of sand's "nameless narrator is a gay man who moved to Florida to look after his aging parents--during the height of the AIDS epidemic--and has found himself unable to leave after their deaths. With gallows humor, he chronicles the indignities of growing old in a small town. At the heart of the novel is the story of his friendship with Earl, whom he met cruising at the local boat ramp. For the last twenty years, he has been visiting Earl...

Holleran has lived the kind of fast-lane gay life, as he says, now wept over in doctors' offices. He knows that desires haven't changed, but the consequences of those desires have. From the porno movie houses to his own bedroom on St. Marks Place, Holleran tells of his last trick, good sex/bad sex, fear, despair--and hope. He says outright what others secretly think, bringing out into the open the nightmares and the enduring passions.