peter cameron

A collection of fourteen stories written between 1982 and 1985, published by Harper & Row in 1986. Some of the stories were first published in THE NEW YORKER, GRAND STREET, THE KENYON REVIEW, and MADEMOISELLE.

"The stories are expertly paced, they display a subtle understanding of psychological relationships, and they show Cameron's remarkable ability to convey, with great pathos and without sentimentality, some of the central quandries of contemporary life." -- Greg Johnson, Atlanta Journal and Constitution

LEAP YEAR charts the uneasy paths people take around the physical and emotional land mines of urban life. Written as a serial novel in 1988 for the newly-launched New York City weekly magazine 7 Days, LEAP YEAR is peopled by a cast of lively and quirky characters and includes an attempted murder, an alleged earthquake, an accidental kidnapping, and an inordinate amount of dining out. LEAP YEAR is an endearing valentine to a New York City that may well be gone but will never be forgetten.

"A lively and funny novel . . . The characters are human and believable and the dialogue crackles in this witty study of life." -- Los Angeles Times

Stories written between 1985 and 1990, previously pubished in THE NEW YORKER, THE PARIS REVIEW, and ROLLING STONE

"Cameron has a wonderful ability to take the tiny, fleeting moments of our lives and show us how rich and meaningful they are. His writing is concise, witty, and compassionate. Peter Cameron's words are worth thousands of pictures. We need all the Peter Cameron we can get." -- Jane Erikson, Arizona Daily Star

"A fascinating literary page-turner . . . THE WEEKEND is a short book, but each line, each word matters . . . Peter Cameron has the rare ability to take an ordinary event and invest it with heart and significance." -- Michael Dorris, Los Angeles Times

"A novel so moving that, on finishing it, we are convinced that something of importance has taken place. We feel deeply moved, and bereft." -- Francine Prose, The Yale Review

"Complexity, precision, lyricism, and passion . . . THE WEEKEND echoes Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence and F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose brilliant narrative critiques of material culture open, again and again, to the metaphysical, to that dimension where the known world cedes to mystery . . . Peter Cameron's tender elegy is as much a love song as a lament, as much a prayer as a dirge." -- Joyce Reiser Kornblatt, The New York Times Book Review

A collection of seventeen stories culled from ONE WAY OR ANOTHER and FAR-FLUNG along with two new stories, one of which (Departing) was the basis for the novel THE WEEKEND.

Page includes a complete list of published stories, 1983 to the present.

Part thriller, part comedy of manners, and part surrealistic dream, ANDORRA is a dazzling, exhilarating novel about deceit, desire, and the illusiveness of memory.

"A nearly perfect book . . . a work of remarkable and sustained invention and imagination." -- Robert Drake, Philidelphia Inquirer

"If THE CITY OF YOUR FINAL DESTINATION were eligible for the Man Booker Prize I would be pressing for it to be on the shortlist. It has all the qualities currently undervalued on the literary scene: understatement, humour, and a dispensing with pedestrian naturalism -- the novel's principal location is Uruguay but it has the dream-like mistiness of somewhere in one of Shakespeare's late plays. Indeed, the whole shift of the novel reminds me of the late comedies, for the other element which makes it so unusual today is that it is, finally, a happy book -- a book about the potential for human beings to grow into gravity and grace." -- Salley Vickers, The London Times

A new novel, schedule to be published by Adelphi (Italy) in May 2007 and by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in September 2007.

"Not since The Catcher in the Rye has a novel captured the deep and almost physical ache of adolescent existential sadness as trenchantly as the perfectly titled Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You." -- James Howe, author of The Misfits

"Un libro bellissimo, gia dal titolo e fino all'ultima pagina." -- Valeria Parrella, Grazia

"Though he’s been accepted by Brown, 18-year-old James isn’t sure he wants to go to college. What he really wants is to buy a nice house in a small town somewhere in the Midwest—Indiana, perhaps. In the meantime, however, he has a dull, make-work job at his thrice-married mother’s Manhattan art gallery, where he finds himself attracted to her assistant, an older man named John. In a clumsy attempt to capture John’s attention, James winds up accused of sexual harassment! A critically acclaimed author of adult fiction, Cameron makes a singularly auspicious entry into the world of YA with this beautifully conceived and written coming of age novel that is, at turns, funny, sad, tender, and sophisticated. James makes a memorable protagonist, touching in his inability to connect with the world but always entertaining in his first person account of his New York environment, his fractured family, his disastrous trip to the nation’s capital, and his ongoing bouts with psychoanalysis. In the process he dramatizes the ambivalences and uncertainties of adolescence in ways that both teen and adult readers will savor and remember." -- Booklist, July 2007

To read the first chapter of Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, please click here