At Danceteria and Other Stories

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Caught in their last moment of decadent obliviousness, the characters in At Danceteria are so blinded by the strobe lights they can’t see what’s waiting in the shadows. While fictional, each of the collection’s seven stories, set at the dawn of the AIDS crisis, takes as their inspiration a real event: Halston and Liza reliving the Studio 54 glory days; Freddie Mercury Roman Holiday-ing Princess Di to a drag show; the Reagan White House rolling out the red carpet for Rock Hudson; a man-on-the-street with main character energy; Jackie Kennedy at a leather bar; a serenading Sylvester; and Keith Haring’s 26th birthday party… hosted by Madonna. Deftly balancing incisive wit and nostalgic melancholy, Walker paints a neon picture of the past, turning queer legends – both lore and people – into vivid reality.

Included in your purchase, exclusively on Audiobrary: Julia Whelan, Ron Butler, and Philip Dean Walker discuss the blurred line between fact and fiction. (Run Time: 1:03)

Philip Dean Walker (Author and Co-Narrator)Philip Dean Walker (Author and Co-Narrator) Philip Dean Walker is the author of AT DANCETERIA AND OTHER STORIES (Squares & Rebels, 2016) which was named a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2017, received from them a starred review, and was chosen by Kirkus Reviews editors as a semi-finalist for the 2017 Kirkus Prize for Fiction. His second collection of stories, READ BY STRANGERS, was published by Lethe Press in April 2018 and was named a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2018 and also received a starred review. His latest collection of stories, BETTER DAVIS AND OTHER STORIES, was published by Squares & Rebels in September 2021 and was named a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2021 and also received a starred review. He holds a B.A. in American Literature from Middlebury College and an M.F.A. in fiction from American University. He lives in Washington, D.C. philipdeanwalker.com

Ron Butler (Co-Narrator)Ron Butler (Co-Narrator) Actor, narrator, and media producer Ron (Ronnie) Butler has over a hundred stage, TV, and film credits, (most notably as a regular on "True Jackson VP” where he played queer icon "Oscar"). He has narrated over 400 audiobook titles, and is a multiple Earphones Award winner, and SOVA and Audie Award nominee. Social media fans may recognize him from his viral Obama music videos, most notable "Modern U.S. President" which resulted in an on-going creative relationship with television producers Norman Lear and Brent Miller. Originally from the Bahamas, he grew up singing Calypso music onstage with his father (“Ronnie Butler, The Godfather of Bahamian Music”), and learning dance from his mother — a ballroom dance teacher and competitor. He is a member of the Atlantic Theater Company, and has taught acting at the Atlantic Theater Company Acting School, AMDA, Pace University, and is on the coaching staff at Narrator.Life. He's just completed writing Season 3 of "Naughty & Nice" for Love Bytes Audio, and is writing (and recording) his own original romance and queer erotica. ronniebutler.com

Julia Whelan (Co-narrator)Julia Whelan (Co-narrator) Dubbed "The Adele of Audiobooks" by The New Yorker, Julia Whelan is an author, screenwriter, lifelong actor, and acclaimed audiobook narrator of over 600 titles. Her performance of her own debut novel, the international bestseller My Oxford Year (coming soon to Netflix), garnered a Society of Voice Arts award. Her 2022 novel, Thank You For Listening, was a Best-of-the-Year pick at Amazon, Audible, and NPR as well as a Goodreads Choice Award nominee and winner of the Golden Poppy. She is the founder of Audiobrary, a new audio publishing company and app, and her latest books – the 8-part romance audio series Casanova LLC and the annotated Victorian poetry anthology The Poetry Of My Oxford Year – debuted exclusively on Audiobrary. She is also a Grammy-nominated audiobook director, a former writing tutor, a half-decent amateur baker, and a certified tea sommelier. jmwhelan.com

In these immaculately crafted stories inspired by the 1980s, Philip Dean Walker spotlights a cast of celebrities and historical figures in situations unsettling as Day-Glo and poignant as roses while the specter of AIDS looms.

Starred Review – Kirkus

A Best Book of 2017 – Kirkus

“Walker’s debut collection imagines encounters between iconic gay men, drag queens, clubgoers, and warmly empathetic female divas in a vibrant but increasingly shadowed demimonde where news of the deaths of friends becomes routine… Walker registers and skillfully evokes the intensely image-bound nature of these boldfaced names—a coked-up Minnelli is “bubbling, a bit manic, laughing. Like a tall puppet”—but also manages to give these brittle narcissists inner lives of needy vulnerability. His supple, fluent prose evokes the inchoate dread haunting the frantic party scene (“The strobe lights from the balcony flickered in just the right way so that, for a second, everyone looked as if they were frozen in time, suspended from the ceiling by wires”). Too cleareyed for nostalgia, this volume paints an evocative, painful, but sympathetic portrait of a cultural watershed. A fine collection of tales about people dancing frenetically on the edge of doom.” – Kirkus Reviews

The slim volume is the Washington, DC-based writer’s debut story collection and takes for its inspiration the heady mix of sex, celebrity, and sinisterness inherent in the ‘80s in cities like New York, DC, and London. Six of the seven stories in At Danceteria conjure the ghosts of deceased celebrities and reimagine them in unique settings… It’s a testament to Walker’s sense of restraint that he resisted the understandable urge to layer too much camp upon these venerated gay icons; the strength of the stories lies in their plausibility as unguarded moments between legends. But it’s not all frivolity in Walker’s world. The very real specter of AIDS hangs over each of the stories like a serial killer in a horror movie lurking just outside the frame—it creeps around the edges, lending an air of foreboding to even the most exuberant scenes.” – Lambda Literary

"This highly original meditation on the '80s is like nothing else you've read. Dead celebrities are brought back to life in the oddest places: Jackie O in a New York sex club, Princess Di in a London drag bar, Rock Hudson at the White House. Plus Sylvester, Halston and Liza, Keith Haring, Madonna, and, best of all, an anonymous narrator who notices that only good-looking guys in New York are getting the new gay cancer. Odd conjunctions, great wit, and the shadow of AIDS make these stories deceptively light and strangely disturbing.” – Andrew Holleran, author of Dancer from the Dance

"In his debut collection At Danceteria and Other Stories, Philip Dean Walker writes with a kind of savage nostalgia, one that knows the past was not prettier or glitzier or more fabulous--only more terrifying. Set in the early 1980s, when the word 'queer' was still an insult and when doctors and nurses invented their own names for the mysterious disease killing beautiful young men, At Danceteria and Other Stories brutally exposes how what we don't know about ourselves can kill us. Walker's writing is vivid, electric and devastating.” – Stephanie Grant, author of The Passion of Alice

"These stories--so funny and inventive, so merciless, smart, and affecting--are like no others I know, populated with American celebutantes, like Liza Minnelli, Jackie Kennedy, and Little Edie Beale, and punctuated by an abiding American loneliness that has the power to break one's heart. Walker's stories are fully, fully alive.” – Richard McCann, author of Mother of Sorrows

"At a time when many young gay writers are forgetting their queer lineage, Philip Dean Walker comes along and schools us with his debut short story collection. Here is Halston, Liza, and Warhol at Studio 54; here is a drag queen who rivals Josephine Baker's star appeal; and here is, in Walker's words, the boy who lived next to the boys next door, dead during the early plague years, but resurrected through Walker's alluring prose, prose that renders the past our present. These stories are clever and do not apologize for their cleverness, like Rock Hudson, who explains here, 'Handsome men know they're handsome. There was no reason to be coy or overly modest about it--that kind of thing just reeked of phoniness to him.' Phony, these stories are not. From the Castro to Grey Gardens, I travelled gleefully alongside Walker in At Danceteria and Other Stories, and am only disappointed the journey had to end.” – D. Gilson, author of I Will Say This Exactly One Time: Essays

"Reading Philip Dean Walker is like being swept into the defiantly glittering rooms of tragedy-darkened souls. Walker's At Danceteria and Other Stories testifies to the tart-tongued power of language to resurrect and witness, in tales that are screamingly funny and hauntingly sad. His men and women radiate an alluring self-awareness and fallibility that touches our deepest places.” – Elise Levine, author of Driving Men Mad

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