Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited

Andrew Holleran’s Ground Zero, first published in 1988 and consisting of 23 Christopher Street essays from the earliest years of the AIDS crisis, was hailed by the Washington Post as “one of the best dispatches from the epidemic’s height.” Twenty years later, with HIV/AIDS long recognized as a global health challenge, Holleran both reiterates and freshly illuminates the devastation wreaked by AIDS, which has claimed the lives of 450,000 gay men as well as 22 million others. Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited features ten pieces never previously republished outside Christopher Street, as well as a new introduction keenly describing and evaluating a historical moment that still informs and defines today’s world-particularly its community of homosexuals, which, arguably, is still recovering from the devastation of AIDS.

• Publishers Weekly
  "Masterfully rendered imagery. Confusion and terror radiate from these pages, and humor of the blackest variety predominates...While Holleran may be correct that the only thing anyone wants to read about AIDS is "CURE FOUND," his essays originally titled Ground Zero stunningly illuminate New Yorkers coping with modern tragedy."Pop Matters
  “A first class document…Holleran's writings give some means by which to disentangle this otherwise unfathomable situation…It is essential reading.”
  
  OutSmart
  “The stories are important for our collective memory. There was a time when the gay community felt attacked by an invisible assailant, and Holleran (a fine writer—reason enough to own this book) records how that went, as it went. Poignant, angry, fearful, beautiful.”
   
  Gay & Lesbian Review, Sep/Oct 2008
  The emotions [these essays] capture makes it a universal drama—a cautionary tale and an unsettling look at how far we haven't come.”
   
  Out Front Colorado, 8/20/08
  “Gems of portraiture.”