In the City of Shy Hunters
Tom Spanbauer
(Grove Press)

Tom Spanbauer is an amazing man. He's an incredible teacher and writer. We're lucky to have him, living here in town. When he first moved to Portland, over a decade ago, I took one of his initial writing workshops. There were only about six of us then, Chuck Palahniuk included. Now Spanbauer is at the center of an ever-increasing throng of adoring students, readers, friends, and fans. As a teacher, he has the gift of insisting, gently, that students turn to their true hearts, to their broken places, and lay themselves bare. The story a writer may be afraid to tell, that's the story that needs to be told.

And now, after 10 years in process, Spanbauer has finished a third novel, in his beautiful voice and careful sentences. His first book, Faraway Places, is a perfect, emotionally evocative novella. The second, The Man Who Fell In Love With the Moon, redefined sex and friendship on the Western frontier. With In The City of Shy Hunters, Spanbauer has set his story during the AIDS crisis in '80's New York, moving everything to the level of myth and mystery, love and loss. There's beauty, sadness, and discovery. It's the life that's bigger than unexamined life, always there.

"Things start where you don't know and end up where you know," he begins the book. "When you know is when you ask, How did this start?

Wolf Swamp. That's how this story started. When I crossed over the East River into the mystery, this city, the fuck-you city.

Wolf Swamp. Or, as you probably know it, Manhattan.

Quite a story, this story, how the fog settles and Manhattan shape-shifts into Wolf Swamp.

Like all Stories, it's a mystery. At the beginning you don't know and then at the end you know. But this mystery isn't the Agatha Christie kind where there's covering up all along and a big revelation at the end.

In this mystery, everything is out there from the first but you don't realize it."