Desire: Tales of New Orleans - Softcover

William Sterling Walker's stories have been anthologized in Best American Gay Fiction 2 and the Lambda Award-winning Fresh Men: New Voices in Gay Fiction, after first appearing in modern words, Harrington Gay Men's Fiction Quarterly and The James White Review. His nonfiction account of coming out appeared in the anthology Boys Like Us: Gay Writers Tell Their Coming Out Stories. He wrote the biographical entries on poet James Merrill and film director Douglas Sirk for The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives. He has written for many publications, including the Boston Book Review and Publisher's Weekly. He holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from Brooklyn College. A native of New Orleans, he now resides in Brooklyn, with his spouse, the artist Jeffrey Dreiblatt.

"William Sterling Walker is a wonderful writer, fluent, warm, intelligent and real. His stories about gay life in New Orleans are firmly rooted in place, and all his characters, gay and straight, are observed with a wise heart and a deep soul."
--Christopher Bram, author of Eminent Outlaws

"Desire is a sensuous, nostalgic, and evocative collection of stories set in sultry New Orleans before that dreamy dream got washed away."
--Valerie Martin, winner of the Orange Prize for Property

"These are stories that ask to be lived in--gorgeous, moody, sophisticated--not unlike the vividly conjured New Orleans that William Sterling Walker's haunted characters inhabit, flee from, inevitably return to. Walker is a brilliant guide through the labyrinth of this city and these seething lives, fluent in the mutually reinforcing tropes of desire and regret."
--Paul Russell, author of The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov

"This beautiful collection is not so much a set of stories as an intricate song cycle, one that arranges and rearranges recurrent fragments of memory and sensation--light, fragrance, and music--like the tesserae of a mosaic, the shifting patterns converging into a haunting panorama of the life of our ecstatic, fated generation of gay men."
--Mark Merlis, author of American Studies and An Arrow's Flight

"Desire is dreamy and affecting, stories of a New Orleans that was gone before Katrina ever got there. It's been a while since I've read a collection so well written, so intricately composed, with such beautiful and evocative descriptions of a time and a place."
--Caroline Fraser, author of God's Perfect Child and Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution