Praise for Idlewild

“An achingly precise novel about a very specific stage . . . Idlewild’s pleasures aren’t accessible only to the relatively small group of people who appreciate the nuances between a Blogspot and a LiveJournal. There’s something universal in the book’s careful excavation of complicated relationships, its compassionate understanding of how friends at that age can love and resent and envy and condescend to each other all at once.”
Vanity Fair

“A deeply relatable portrait of queer adolescence . . . With any hope, it will go down in the annals of high-school-theater-kid literary history like Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise.”
Vogue, Best LGBTQ+ Books of the Year (So Far)

“[A] hilarious and sexy debut . . . Equal parts funny and insightful, this is a propulsive exploration of gender identity, sexuality, and self-discovery.”
Kirkus

“Idlewild is an outrageously funny novel that is deeply serious about the joys and calamities of friendship. With rare skill and precision, James Frankie Thomas captures all the laughter, the tears, and the ever-evolving inside jokes that cohere between two people who have finally found each other in the strangest place imaginable. This novel made me want to call my oldest friends, only to realize that the numbers are all changed. Idlewild is a major novel—modern and singular. James Frankie Thomas has written a new novel of friendship for a new world. We’re all better for it.”
Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life and Filthy Animals

About the Author

James Frankie Thomas is a lifelong New Yorker. He attended the City College of New York and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has worked as a video store clerk, a Shakespeare tutor, and the “YA of Yore” columnist for the Paris Review; he was most recently a theater critic at Vulture. Idlewild is his first novel.

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