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The Single Life

Wake up. Go to work. Head to the gym. Flirt with a student. Welcome to a day in the lonely life of George, a 58-year-old gay college professor at the center of Christopher Isherwood’s humorous and heartbreaking 1964 novel, A Single Man. When it was confirmed last week that fashion designer Tom Ford will make his directorial debut with an all-star feature film based on the book, we dug up our copy of the gay-lit classic and found the brief tome is well worth a read — or a reread.

Isherwood, the prolific author of The Berlin Stories, on which Cabaret is based, excels at making George’s mundane tasks amusing. While chatting with a colleague, George zones out and cruises two hot tennis players. This unabashed depiction of gay lust was far ahead of its time when the book was written more than 40 years ago.

Isherwood’s prose shines most when he is exposing George’s emptiness, as he does while describing a trip to the grocery store that stirs up thoughts of a dead lover. “Ambushed among its bottles and cartons and cans are shockingly vivid memories of meals shopped for, cooked, eaten with Jim,” he writes. “They stab at George as he passes.”


A Single Man is available now from University of Minnesota Press.