One day in the spring of 1993, author Harold Brodkey checked into a Manhattan emergency room unable to move and scarcely able to breathe. When he was later diagnosed with the AIDS virus, Brodkey greeted the devastating - and completely unexpected - news with an odd lightheartedness, a perverse fascination with his passage from the ranks of the living to the fraternity of the dying.

As a novelist, he refused the fate that had been assigned to him: his acute editorial sensibility told him that he had been badly miscast as a condemned man.

In This Wild Darkness, Brodkey, who died on January 26, 1996, examines his predicament with the same irony and lucidity he brought to his acclaimed fiction. Part journal, part memoir, part essay, this book offers a frank and profound exploration of Brodkey's sexuality, his relationships, and the slow, withering advance of his disease. A stirring self-portrait from one of our greatest men of letters, This Wild Darkness lends a fresh and heroic perspective to the subject of AIDS, death, and love.