A Comfortable Corner

The 1982 novel of love and recovery from alcoholism back in print.“I wish I lived in Vincent Virga’s tragic, glamorous world.” –Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story and The Loves of My Life: A Sex MemoirA Comfortable Corner is a novel like no other, alive with hope and struggle, desperation and compassion, loneliness and community. Gay, straight, generational -alcoholism and recovery is an American story. This historically important, socially relevant book is now back in print for the first time since 1982.“I read A Comfortable Corner more than forty years ago. A friend handed it to me when I was trying to change my life. I bombed through its gleeful coziness and was delightedly puzzled that so much beautiful writing (and Vincent Virga is a beautiful writer – just go see for yourself – such passages! He does nature and bodies and cityscapes and food, he does everything in a lusty detailed rush in time) can also deliver a message because this is a book probably most of all for someone – well two someones, those interested in recovery and interested in a pitch perfect account of gay life.” –from the new introduction by Eileen Myles, Chelsea Girls: A Novel“Come for the luscious mandarin prose, stay for the operatic sweep of lives unraveling and rebuilding in this bejeweled time capsule of a novel. Arch, dazzling, glamorously romantic even at its most sensationally lurid, A Comfortable Corner is by turns a bittersweet remembrance of the post-Stonewall/pre-AIDS Seventies, a harrowing account of the berserker ravages of alcohol, a heartfelt narrative of suffering and the unquenchable human need to love and be loved. A most remarkable book.” –Paul Russell, The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov and Boys of Life“If Gaywyck is Virga’s Jane Eyre, A Comfortable Corner is his Middlemarch. A Comfortable Corner enfolded me in the love at its heart and the truly gimlet-eyed portrait of its world.” –Larry Mellman, The Ballot BoyVincent Virga is the author of the first gay gothic romance, Gaywyck (1980) with a happy ending, as well as A Comfortable Corner (1982) and Vadriel Vail (2001). Virga is the only person in NYC publishing who researches, edits, designs, & captions picture inserts for nonfiction books; he has done 163 books. He also spent over two decades working with the curators at the Library of Congress on 29 books. He is currently experiencing a renaissance with all his fiction returning to print, including two unpublished Gaywyck books completing the Gaywyck Quartet. His life-companion since 1964 is the fellow writer James McCourt. Their papers are held at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. They live in Manhattan and Ireland. Read more