Jamaican Literary Gay Icon Thomas Glave makes the OUT100.com list of honorees

Thomas Glave (Photoed writing)

THE BOOK CLUB

THOMAS GLAVE & VESTAL MCINTYRE

With its nameless protagonists, unusual punctuation, poetic breaks, and graphic depictions of genocide and antigay violence, Glave’s The Torturer’s Wife is about as far as you’ll get from a breezy beach read. Nonetheless, the Lambda Literary Award winner’s experimental short story collection—which tackles war, slavery, turbulent gay relationships, and HIV—contained some of 2009’s most compelling moments in queer literature. Glave (left) is only the second gay African American (after James Baldwin) to win the O. Henry Prize for short fiction.

A National Endowment for the Arts fellowship recipient and former Meatpacking District waiter, 37-year-old McIntyre (right) published his first novel, Lake Overturn, this year (set in mid-’80s small-town Idaho, it was an Out’s critic’s pick in April). The 37-year-old Idaho native, whose previous collection of short stories, You Are Not the One, was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, is currently at work on a new series of stories he describes as “a bitchy good-bye letter” to New York City, which he left in 2008 to live with his husband in London.