I Loved You More

       

Praise for

Tom Spanbauer

I Loved You More

A great read,
I Loved You More
is a brutal and beautiful book of love, sex, and friendship that begins in the impossible but totally mesmerizing decade of the 1980s and spans the next twenty years.

         
SAM ADAMS
, Former Mayor of Portland, Oregon

A masterful novel of what becomes of us long after we've “come of age” and done all the brave things we thought would save us. Tom Spanbauer's pages pulse with life in all its messy beauty.

         
ARIEL GORE
, Publisher of
Hip Mama
magazine and author of
The End of Eve

Intelligence, wit, generosity, love, wisdom, insight, humility, guts, heart-crushing truth and spirit-lifting grace – it's all there in
I Loved You More
. This is Tom Spanbauer's wrenching and beautiful masterpiece.

         
CHERYL STRAYED
, Author of
Wild

Tom Spanbauer's
I Loved You More
is the most important book on sexuality, love, and the lowdown of relationships that I have ever read. The brilliant language is an epic ballad so deeply rendered it killed me and resurrected me a page at a time. This book is not a love story. It guts the heart of the cliché love story and hands it back to you, beating. Love is the endless falling.

         
LIDIA YUKNAVITCH
, Author of
Dora: A Headcase

Faraway Places

The thing about Tom Spanbauer is – he is the real deal. [
Faraway Places
] is masterly – a near perfect book. The story is hypnotic, mesmerizing, delicately brilliant – and so well made. While you are lulled by the language and the characters, the storyline builds and then like a well-timed firework explodes – surprising, enthralling, captivating.

         
A.M. HOMES
, Author of
May We Be Forgiven

A taut, brutal narrative … that comes to hypnotize, shimmering like the brilliant sun on the alfalfa fields.

         
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

Forceful and moving … Spanbauer tells his short, brutal story with delicacy and deep respect for place and character.

         
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon

The miracle of this novel it that it obliges us to rethink our whole idea of narration and history and myth. Tom Spanbauer's wild West is the hurly-burly of the mind. He takes us into territories where few of us would ever dare to go.

         
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

Haunting and earthy, this deeply felt tale of love and loss … Spanbauer fuses raunchy dialogue, pathos, local color, heartbreak and a serious investigation of racism in this stunning narrative.

         
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

Gender and racial lines are bent out of shape in this tale of turn-of-the-century Idaho spun by a youth who is part Indian, not quite wholly homosexual, and in the grip of a powerful imagination. Spanbauer creates a pansexual West that John Wayne wouldn't have recognized.

         
KIRKUS REVIEWS

A visceral, sprawling tragic-comedy …
The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon
is equal parts bizarre
Bildungsroman
, raucous picaresque, and hard-driving wild-West yarn.

         
NEW YORK MAGAZINE

A masterful plot … Delightfully unpredictable and compelling.

         
LIBRARY JOURNAL

In The City of Shy Hunters

An expertly drawn, starkly authentic, early-1980s Manhattan provides the setting for this sprawling novel by Spanbauer. Spanbauer's rapid-fire narration and clipped sentences generate a surprising amount of tension and gritty emotion, as does his vibrant, dead-on dialogue and keen sense of place. This is a big, brazen, histrionic work of fiction, one that pays respectable, if unsentimental, homage to a devastating period in gay history.

         
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

Unlike other “early
AIDS
” novels, this one acknowledges that
AIDS
touches all classes, races, religions, and sexual orientations. Excellent characters (real New Yorkers), great writing, and a new twist on an over-used plot recommend this book for most libraries, though some readers might want a more conventional ending.

         
LIBRARY JOURNAL

A master narrator and stylist…
In the City of Shy Hunters
is so finely crafted, Spanbauer's characters so true to life, the New York City he remembers from the early days of the plague so exactly captures in its “unrelenting” mess and glory, you'll think you've been reading a modernist classic.

         
PETER KURTH
,
Salon.com

Spanbauer's genius resides even in the asides … teas[ing] out the genuine complexity of human love.

         
THOMAS MCGONIGLE
,
The Washington Post

In the City of Shy Hunters
has the earmarks of a literary landmark … Its importance and originality are unmistakable.

         
LAURA DEMANSKI
,
The Baltimore Sun

Ambitious and compelling … a mixture of the ghastly, the hilariousism and the curiously touching.

         
JOHN HARTL
,
The Seattle Times

In the City of Shy Hunters
is a chronicle of deaths foretold, a journal of the plague years when
AIDS
swept through the city and destroyed a culture that had barely taken hold.

         
JEFF BAKER
,
The Oregonian

A big ambitious stylefest of a novel, in the mode of … Edmund White's
The Farewell Symphony
, Allan Gurganus's
Plays Well with Others
, and Dale Peak's
Now It's Time to Say Goodbye
… What distinguishes Spanbauer's
novel from the rest of the pack is his hellish, distinctive voice. Longtime fans will recognize its unusual sentences, at once choppy and strangely elegant, overtly informative but weirdly surreal, tender of phrase yet cleansed of overt emotion.

         
DENNIS COOPER
,
The Village Voice

Tom Spanbauer breaks all the rules in his new novel
In the City of Shy Hunters
– rules of grammar, rules of social propriety, rules of sanctioned sexuality, rules that keep a novelist at a desk, on a page, in the real world.

         
M. L. LYKE
,
Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Mesmerizing dialogue and gritty characters immediately startle you … The book may consist of letters typed upon a page, but those words transcend mere storytelling by nearly leaping forth and materializing into a stunning theatrical presentation. This writing as performance art… Our beloved Spanbauer has retaken center stage. He has surpassed the art of writing dangerously to create the theater of writing dramatically.

         
SUSAN WICKSTORM
,
Willamette Week

In the City of Shy Hunters
is near-epic in its emotional scope, a sprawling story that recalls at once the freewheeling black comedy of Ken Kesey's work, the spiritual quest at the heart of
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
, and some of the precise diction of Gertrude Stein. …There is such a myriad of small truths here that the cumulative effect is overwhelming …Fascinating and compelling.

         
KEN FURTADO
,
Lambda Book Report

Now Is the Hour

Publishers Weekly
choice for one of the best 100 books of 2006

This author can write. You feel pulled in immediately just by the rhythms of his language. Then by his great humor, his vast heart. There is no one like Tom Spanbauer writing in America. What a terrific novel! What a huge talent.

         
NATALIE GOLDBERG
, Author of
Writing Down the Bones

In Tom Spanbauer's
Now Is the Hour
, white small-town America gets its cherry busted in an orgy of cigarette smoke and racism.

         
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
, author of
Fight Club

Copyright ©2013 Tom Spanbauer

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage-and-retrieval systems, without prior permission in writing from the Publisher, except for brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Spanbauer, Tom.

I loved you more : a novel / By Tom Spanbauer.

pages cm

ISBN
978-0-9893604-2-5

I. Title.

PS
3569.P339L68 2013

813'.54 –
DC
23

Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts

2201 Northeast 23rd Avenue

3rd Floor

Portland, Oregon 97212

hawthornebooks.com

Form
:

Adam McIsaac/Sibley House

Set in Paperback

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Pete

ALSO BY TOM SPANBAUER

Faraway Places

The Man Who Fell In Love With the Moon

In the City of Shy Hunters

Now Is the Hour