Men Touching - Softcover

"With sensitivity and deadpan humor, Alley's luminous stories explore a wealth of characters and social types thrown into fertile combinations. His prose is limpid and straightforward, laced with droll psychology . . . and sometimes opening into an evocative, elegiac poetry . . . . The results are funny, poignant, and engrossing. . . . A fine collection that explores and celebrates the ebb and flow of gay life."
--Kirkus Reviews on The Dahlia Field (starred review and Kirkus' Best Indie Books of 2017)

"Henry Alley is an excellent writer. His fiction is artfully artless, clear, concise, and real. Best of all, he regularly tells stories that nobody else is telling."
--Christopher Bram

"The Dahlia Field is an impressive introduction to Alley, whose work I wasn't familiar with beforehand but will now purposefully seek out."
-- Christopher Verleger, Edge

"Henry Alley delineates an endearing picture of the Pacific Northwest as well as some points beyond. In his precise yet vivid prose he gets to the heart of both a physical setting and the emotions of its inhabitants. These inhabitants, more often than not, are gay men of a certain age who are still at the height of their sexuality and draw. The men he writes of are waking up to the possibilities of their sexuality and striving to break free of society's limitations. But the problems of those cities, especially the scourge of AIDS--the very fear of it--still touch their everyday lives."
--John Francis Leonard, A&U Magazine

In this beautifully wrought new novel, Henry Alley explores the complexities of a flawed leading character with great sensitivity and unexpected depth. In doing so, he brings to life again a typical gay man of the mid-eighties with all the fears and hopes of that particular time in our culture. . . . And this is what this engrossing novel does so well, it explores the emotional and intellectual lives of its central characters with captivating verisimilitude. Alley has a rare gift and once again captures the truth of a mature gay man from a time and a place obviously both personal and sacred. -- J. Francis Leonard, A & U Magazine

Alley (The Dahlia Field, etc. 2017, etc.) is a skillful writer who draws realistic characters and crafts well-turned comic vignettes . . . . There's a psychological frankness to the novel, with many pointed discussions as characters internalize the lesson that they must take responsibility for theirown lives. Counterpoised to that realism is a giddy sexual lyricism . . . . Odes to the healing power of man-on-man touching blossom throughout. -- Kirkus Reviews

Closets. All around there are closets with trap doors that the characters Robb and Bart must go through to find peace and reconciliation in Henry Alley's moving new novel, Men Touching, published this year by Chelsea Station Editions. Alley . . . takes readers through Robb's PTSD following the Vietnam War and his drug addiction. They mask the horrors of a hit-and-run incident in Saigon. Bart is a high school drama teacher, a gay man coming out to his family and a caregiver to a man dying of HIV/AIDS. All of it is set in the 1980s of Alley's native Seattle. The two stories merge until each man is able to stand on his own, haltingly at first, then with stride and purpose. Men Touching is Alley's fifth novel. -- Dan Buckwalter, Eugene Weekly