John Weir, winner of the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction for Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me, is the author of two novels, The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, winner of the 1989 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men’s Debut Fiction, and What I Did Wrong. He is an associate professor of English at Queens College CUNY, where he teaches the MFA in creative writing and literary translation. In 1991, with members of ACT UP New York, he interrupted Dan Rather’s CBS Evening News to protest government and media neglect of AIDS. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

“Your Nostalgia is Killing Me is a witty short story collection. Eleven linked first-person short stories tell the story of a protagonist whose early adolescent experiences of homophobia in a small town and whose adult loss of his best friend to AIDS during the height of the epidemic write the script for his life, propelling him in and out of relationships with friends, loved ones, and lovers who expect too much or too little. Taking place at acting classes, cinemas, funerals, high school graduation ceremonies, plays, public protest demonstrations, retirement homes, and sex parlors, these eleven linked stories pull at the thin line between erasure and exposure, all the while skillfully highlighting the performative nature of death, grief, illness, love, masculinity, and sexuality against the backdrop of late twentieth-century US culture.”—Dr. Amina Gautier