Nothing Ever Just Disappears

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

Nothing Ever Just Disappears retraces the footsteps of some of the twentieth century's most remarkable queer writers and artists. Moving through their homes and haunts, it explores the deep connections between where they lived, who they were and the iconoclastic art and literature they created.

In search of a new history of queer culture, Diarmuid Hester travels from Cambridge's ancient cloisters to the smoky clubs of Jazz Age Paris, through the bunkers of Nazi-occupied Jersey to the newly-liberated gaybourhoods of New York and beyond. Authoritative and not a little irreverent, Hester brings to life the bars and basements, homes and studios, cities and landscapes that shaped the sexual identities of such extraordinary figures as E. M. Forster, Josephine Baker, James Baldwin and Derek Jarman.

A provocative argument for the centrality of space to any consideration of queer history, culture and politics, the book also attests to all that is lost when queer spaces are forgotten. Nothing Ever Just Disappears is the first trade book from an astonishing writer and thinker.

Featuring Derek Jarman, E. M. Forster, London's queer suffragettes, Josephine Baker, Claude Cahun, James Baldwin, Jack Smith and Kevin Killian.

©2023 Diarmuid Hester (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

  • Diarmuid Hester has written a book I have always wanted to read. An exploration, celebration and reclamation of queer lives within their spaces and landscapes, it roams from the cloisters and locked gates of Cambridge to the hilly streets of San Francisco, the apartments of New York City and the nuclear desert of Dungeness’s shingle-shore, where Derek Jarman created a world on the margins and of the margins. Hester is a fizzingly brilliant writer, and with its fusion of personal testimony, reportage, cultural history and literary criticism, this book will surely find a wide readership

    Robert MacFarlane

  • A moving, erudite book. Writing against the tide of erasure, Hester takes us on a journey through time, over land and sea, and casts an empathetic and sharply humorous eye on this pantheon of queer figures. A hymn to the importance of community and place, this is a vital public history of queer life that is both intimate and wondrously radical

    Seán Hewitt, author of All Down Darkness Wide

  • Diarmuid Hester’s beautifully written psycho-biography explores obscure corners of places as sites of hidden queer histories. His portraits of writers and activists from E.M. Forster to Josephine Baker, London’s queer suffragettes and Kevin Killian are haunted and haunting – totally riveting

    Chris Kraus

  • A charming, playfully challenging companion on a dreamy quest through lost landscapes of defiance, imagination and desire

    Jeremy Atherton Lin

  • Hester’s book is insightful, delightful, and enlightening: an essential entrant into the queer canon

    Isabel Waidner

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