Works by
Tom Spanbauer
(Writer)

Visions and Voices from the Northwest (Date?)
Duane Schnabel, John Rember, Jorie Graham, Kevan Smith, Romey Stuckart, Stephen Schultz, Terry Tempest Williams, Tom Spanbauer, and Will Baker

Faraway Places (1988)

The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon: A Novel (1991)
The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon is an American epic of the old West for our own times -- a novel huge in its imaginative scope and daring in its themes. The narrator is Shed, or Duivichi-un-Dua, a half-breed bisexual boy who makes his living at the Indian Head Hotel in the little turn-of-the-century town of Excellent, Idaho. The imperious Ida Richilieu is Shed's employer, the town's mayor and the mistress, and the mistress and owner of this outrageously pink whorehouse. Together with the beautiful prostitute Alma Hatch, and the philosophical, green-eyed, half-crazy cowboy Dellwood Barker, this collection of misfits and outcasts make up the core of Shed's eccentric family. And although laced with the ugliness and cruelty of the frontier West -- Shed is raped by the same man who then murders the woman he thinks is his mother, and the Mormon townspeople bring a fiery end to Ida's raucous way of life -- the love and acceptance that tie this family together provide the true heart of this novel. The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon is a beautifully told, mythic tale that is as well a profound meditation on sexuality, race and man's relationship to himself and the natural world.

In the City of Shy Hunters (2001) -- Finalist of the 2001 Lambda Literary Award for Male Fiction
Fictionalized chronicle of the decimation of gay culture in New York City during the early years of the AIDS epidemic.

Now Is the Hour (2005) -- Finalist, 2006 Lambda Literary Award for Male Fiction
The year is 1967, and Rigby John Klusener, seventeen years old and finally leaving his home and family in Pocatello, Idaho, is on the highway with his thumb out and a flower behind his ear, headed for San Francisco. Now Is the Hour is the wondrous story of how Rigby John got to this point. It traces his gradual emancipation from the repressions of a strictly religious farming family and from the small-minded, bigoted community in which he has grown up, during a time of explosive cultural change. Transforming this familiar journey from American Graffiti to On the Road to something rich and strange and hilarious is the persona of Rigby John himself. Intimately in touch with his fears, hesitantly awakening to his own sexuality, and palpably open to life's mysteries, Rigby John is a protagonist whom readers will fall in love with, root for, and be moved by. Now Is the Hour is a powerful, vastly entertaining story of self-awakening, of the complex bonds of family, and ultimately of America during a period of tremendous upheaval.