Works by
Brian Keith Jackson
(Writer)

• The View From Here (1997)
  Brian Keith Jackson's acclaimed debut novel treads the same rich literary soil as the work of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison--with equally memorable results. Evoking a world of casual prejudice and commonplace poverty, Jackson tells the haunting story of Anna Anderson Thomas, whose life in the rural South has edged slowly toward loneliness. Married in her youth to her beloved J.T., she has devoted her days to raising their five boys, all while stepping softly around her husband's vast silences. But now, with their sixth child on the way--a girl this time, she is sure--Anna faces a challenge that threatens to destroy the family she's fought so hard to preserve.
  
  Pulsing with raw emotional power and earthy humor, and narrated in part by the omniscient voice of Ann's unborn child, THE VIEW FROM HERE builds to a conclusion that both shocks and heals--and lays bare the universal truths that bind all families.

• Walking Through Mirrors (1998)
  His grandmother, Mama B, called him Patience. Jeremy was, she said, the most agreeable child. He would have liked to tell her that, even while growing up, his hidden wants festered deep inside him. His mother died just hours after his birth, and he was raised by Mama B and his Aunt Jess after his father disappeared. Even after his dad returned one day with his new family, Jeremy kept his distance. But it is a decade later, and Jeremy, now a successful New York photographer, gets a phone call from Louisiana. It is time for Jeremy Bishop to journey the long way home to help bury his father. In the graveyard where his father's body will be laid to rest; in a stranger's appearance at the wake; in a suicide; a murder; and finally inside a cardboard box that had belonged to his father, Jeremy will find himself in ways he never imagined. Conjuring Jeremy's youth in flashbacks as textured as the denim patch on his grandmother's rocking chair, Jackson weaves together past and present in a novel at once astonishing and universally human.

• The Queen of Harlem: A Novel (2002)
  Mason Randolph, a black preppie of impeccable Southern pedigree, is bound for Stanford Law School after graduating from college. Before embarking on the path to his golden future, however, he takes a detour through Harlem, where he intends to live "authentically" with "real black people."
  
  Mason takes the name "Malik" and moves into the orbit of the ever—fabulous Carmen, uptown diva and doyenne of Harlem. Carmen, always ready to have a handsome young man at her fabulous soirees and to add to her devoted entourage, happily takes him under her wing. Fueled by his parents' money and dodging the people who remember him as Mason Randolph, "Malik" masquerades as a "ghettonian," exploring the wonders and pleasures of a Harlem in the midst of a second Renaissance. But his odyssey takes a different turn when he meets Kyra, whose world mirrors the one he has abandoned. As he contemplates the choices Kyra has made, and begins to reexamine his own presumptions about identity and authenticity, Mason realizes that everyone has something to hide and that to get what we want, we have to be willing to let go of our secrets.
  
  People compared Brian Keith Jackson's remarkable first novel, The View from Here, to the works of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, and Publishers Weekly called it "an extraordinary debut...[by] a formidable craftsman and exceptionally gifted storyteller." A novel rich in humor and insight, The Queen of Harlem will earn Jackson a much—deserved place in the center of today’s literary landscape.

See also:

• Something Inside: Conversations With Gay Fiction Writers (1980, 1999)  by Philip Gambone, Compiler and Robert Giard, Photographer
  In the last twenty years, gay literature has earned a place at the American and British literary tables, spawning its own constellation of important writers and winning a dedicated audience. No one though, until Philip Gambone, has attempted to offer a collective portrait of our most important gay writers. This collection of interviews attempts just that, and is notable both for the depth of Gambone's probing conversations and for the sheer range of important authors included. Virtually every prominent gay author writing in English today is here, including Alan Hollinghurst, Allen Barnett, Andrew Holleran, Bernard Cooper, Brad Gooch, Brian Keith Jackson, Christopher Bram, David Leavitt, David Plante, Dennis Cooper, Edmund White, Gary Glickman, John Preston, Joseph Hansen, Lev Raphael, Michael Cunningham, Michael Lowenthal, Michael Nava, Paul Monette, Peter Cameron, and Scott Heim.