[close] In the almost 30 years since Stonewall, the gay male novel has settled into a few comfortable forms: the coming out story, the sex story, the AIDS story. Philippe Tapon's shocking new novel A Parisian from Kansas takes those forms and shakes them, bullies them, into something new. Ostensibly the story of Daren Swenson, an HIV-positive American living in Paris, as told by a fictional Philippe Tapon, A Parisian from Kansas is really a meta-novel. A meditation on writing and the imagination, it is more concerned with how we turn reality into imagination, fact into fiction, and our lives into art. This is one of the most original works of gay fiction in years. [close]