In Paris during the eighties and nineties, a journalist from Libération recounts the extraordinary adventures of Willie, Doumé, and Leibowitz. The first is a young provincial man of splendid beauty who becomes the king of the Parisian gay nightlife. The Corsican Doumé was Willie's lover and founder of the first French homosexual liberation movement. Leibo, the narrator's married lover, is a young philosopher who begins aligned with the divine left and ends his career in a ministry.

Willie contracts AIDS and becomes a media figure on the edge of grotesqueness, and a wild and furious enemy of Doumé.

The Best Part of Men is Tristan Garcia's first novel, and it strongly attracted the interest of the press and the public from the moment of its publication. With a direct style and an approach foreign to the autobiographical genres in vogue, Garcia — who by age could not have known the years he depicts — evokes that era with surprising effectiveness and vividness.

Reviews

"With The Best Part of Men, his first novel, Tristan Garcia establishes himself as the literary revelation of the year. His story of the eighties and nineties, between the homosexual scene and the new philosophers, is a magnificent moral tale of universal scope." — Nelly Kaprièlian.

"Garcia skillfully describes the intellectual recompositions of the two past decades: the last breath of utopias, the left's conversion to capitalism, the transformations of activism, the significance of fractures within the gay community, embodied by the hatred between Dominique and William. With great courage, he takes hold of recent history and offers, beyond the fate of his characters, a genuine novel of ideas, something very rare in French literature." — Jean Hurin, Le Magazine littéraire.

"In France, writers rarely venture into the territory of contemporary history. Tristan Garcia is not afraid to make a political reading of the debates sparked by AIDS in the nineties. He knows how to novelize in an engaging way those years we thought empty, ugly, and useless and, in a modern manner, at once amusing, cruel, and pathetic, he sketches the portrait of familiar characters who move us almost unintentionally." — François Ozon, Les Inrockuptibles.

"A cruel and dark lucidity. A revelation." — Christine Rousseau, Le Monde.

"An intense and rough novel like smuggled liquor." — Claude Arnaud, Le Point.

"The birth of a genuine writer." — Dominique Fernandez, Le Nouvel Observateur.

About the author

Tristan Garcia (Toulouse, 1981) is a French writer and philosopher. He became known suddenly with his first novel, The Best Part of Men, which won the Flore Prize (2008) and established him as one of the most promising voices of his generation. His work — both narrative and essay — explores themes such as identity, politics, mass culture, and the tensions between desire, fame, and media power. Besides his literary work, he carries out intense intellectual activity in the field of contemporary thought.