Tom Spanbauer

In the City of Shy Hunters follows Will Parker from the Northwest to New York, where the specter of AIDS looms large. Salon Magazine's Peter Kurth reminds the reader that Spanbauer's "fiction, while riding on conventional coming-of-age, coming-to-terms, coming-out plots, is unlike any you've read or are likely to read before this epidemic ends. Yes, AIDS provides the thematic backdrop of In the City of Shy Hunters. Yes, Spanbauer himself was diagnosed with "full-blown" AIDS in 1996. But 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 captured in its "unrelenting" mess and glory, you'll think you've been reading a modernist classic by the time you're through, rather than the latest entry in an artificial, post-post genre." Publishers Weekly called it "a big, brazen, histrionic work of fiction."

The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon was a finalist for the 1992 Stonewall Book Award. Stephen Dubner, writing for New York Magazine, describes the novel as "a sprawling tragicomedy set in a gold-rush town called Excellent, Idaho. Shed, who is definitely bisexual and most likely mixed race, shares time, beds, and whiskey bottles with a pair of loving, flamboyant prostitutes and a soulful rancher who might be his father. The book is equal parts bizarre Bildungsroman, raucous picaresque, and hard-driving wild-West yarn." In keeping with the thread of autobiography that runs through his novels "by the time his first novel was published... in 1988, Spanbauer had already descended into Shed's twisted world, where morality, sexuality, and race are gigantic question marks," and he admits to going to "a very, very dark place" while writing The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon.

Tom Spanbauer is an American writer whose work often explores issues of sexuality, race, and the ties that bind disparate people together. Raised in Idaho, Spanbauer has lived in Kenya and across the United States. He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he teaches a course titled "dangerous writing". He graduated in 1988 from Columbia University with an MFA in Fiction and has written five novels.

Volume 1 of The Quarterly, published in the 1987 spring edition, featured Spanbauer's "Sea Animals."