Lies - Ned Rorem

The long-awaited new book from "one of the great diarists in our language. . . [His works] delight, amuse, and enlarge our understanding of music and of life. "-Richard Dyer, Boston Globe . . Ned Rorem's new diary opens in 1986, when the author is sixty-two, and closes in 1999, when he is seventy-five. Though Rorem remains as energetic as ever during these years-new books written, new songs composed-the tone of this diary is autumnal: his life, and his world, are winding down. He mourns the passing of old friends and mentors (Virgil Thomson, Jean Genet), endures the indignities of old age (dental calamity, prostate trouble), and notes with bitterness the collapse of taste and standards that once defined his artistic circle. In the most moving pages here, he describes in compassionate but unsentimental detail the decline of his longtime companion, Jim Holmes, and, in the book's closing pages, his death. Like the previous volumes of the diary, Lies is an anthology of forms and modes, each entry a carefully chosen, brightly colored tile in a literary mosaic.;It features all the elements readers have come to expect from the diary: indiscretions, aphorisms, fantasies, slights, program notes, word games, eulogies, and more. In short, Lies is vintage Rorem, by turns catty, silly, outrageous, and insightful, profound, elegiac. It will only enlarge the diary's reputation as both an incomparably dishy read and a distinguished literary achievement.