The American People: Volume 2

“A river of blood courses through Kramer’s epic. That blood is bought and sold and swapped and spilled. If both volumes of The American People were the only books left behind by our species, an alien people who discovered them would, at the very least, really know that we had been here … beautiful and humane.” –Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review

“The American People … takes your breath away. There are few novels like it in our literature–not only in terms of scope but also in its crazed stagger between pathos and camp, realism and absurdism, plain lyricism and obscenity.” –Jeremy Lybarger, The Nation

“A queer epic of love and death … The second volume of Kramer’s magnum opus summons times and voices from the depths of America’s plague years. A tale of persistence, disease, and love, it deserves to be reckoned with on Kramer’s own terms.” –Cathy Corman, The Provincetown Independent

“This is the greatest, most alarming, most insane AIDS novel anybody is ever going to write or want to write … There’s also Larry Kramer himself, fiercely present on virtually every page of the book, reminding readers that he’s been yelling at them for half a century … The book is a whiteout blizzard of anger, outrage, showboating, and satire, a dark epic just crying out for a long review by the late John Leonard.” –Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Review

“An acerbic, brilliant history of the age of AIDS … A flawless exercise in black humor, it is also filled with righteous anger–and, as each page indicates, not without good reason. Idiosyncratic, controversial, and eminently readable: a masterwork of alternative history.” –Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Larry Kramer is a screenwriter (Women in Love, Oscar nomination); a playwright (The Normal Heart, Tony Award); a bestselling novelist (Faggots); and an activist for gay rights and AIDS awareness (cofounder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis and founder of ACT UP). He has been honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, PEN, and Common Cause, and received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Yale University.

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