people his work. Polish cops and Greek fishermen, mercenaries and arms dealers, child prostitutes and wannabe terrorists, Indian Chiefs and Indian tailors: he hung with them all in an unparalleled international career that had him smuggle banned plays from behind the Iron Curtain, maneuver through Occupied Territories, and stowaway aboard a ‘devil’s barge’ for a three-day crossing from Cape Verde that landed him in an African jail.
Smith has won top honors for his novels, screenplays and stage plays in numerous prestigious competitions. Fire on the Island won the Gold Medal in the Faulkner-Wisdom Competition for the Novel, and his screenplay adaptation of it was named Best Indie Script by WriteMovies. Another novel, The Fourth Courier, was a finalist for Best Gay Mystery in the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards. Previously, he won the Paris Prize for Fiction (now the de Groot Prize) for his novel, Checkpoint (later published as A Vision of Angels). Kirkus Reviews called Cooper’s Promise “literary dynamite” and selected it as one of the Best Books of 2012.
Smith's latest novel is Istanbul Crossing.
One novel on his recent reading list:
Rabih Alameddine is no stranger to the LGBTQ literary community. In 2017, his novel, The Angel of History, won the Lammy Award for Best Gay Novel, and he’s a frequent essayist-cum- philosopher on subjects ranging from HIV/AIDS to the emerging status of gay writers and the role we play in world literature.Visit Timothy Jay Smith's website.
Somewhat belatedly, I learned about his book, The Wrong End of the Telescope, published in 2021. In it, a trans Lebanese doctor (living in Chicago with her wife) travels to the Greek island of Lesbos for a short stay to help refugees – primarily Syrian – who arrive by crossing a narrow but treacherous channel from Turkey.
The setting intrigued me for more than the obvious reason that it’s set in Greece. For over twenty years, I’ve gone every year to Lesbos and know exactly where Alameddine has set his novel. At the height the refugee crisis (2015-2017), I assisted the relief efforts in manycapacities, so I was especially curious how he would describe and characterize the situation.
Alameddine’s portrayal of the place, people, and situation is perfect. For anyone who wants to know how the refugee crisis played out in terms of the interactions between volunteers, international aid agencies, and local villagers, Telescope captures it – including cringe-worthy moments when volunteers take selfies with refugees who’ve barely had a chance to find their footing on solid land.
Alameddine has always used his writing to bear witness to social injustice and Telescope is no exception. The refugee crisis swamping Europe was of such magnitude that it was almost easier for people to ignore it than conceive of any way that they could help. (Over one twelve-month period, 500,000 refugees arrived on Lesbos’s northern rocky coast adjacent to villages of no more than a few hundred people.) Alameddine was determined that people viscerally recognize the human tragedy in the crisis.
He traveled to Lesbos to find his story and characters. As soon as he gives them names, for his readers, they become real people. Mina, the trans doctor from Chicago, befriends Sumaiya, a gravely ill refugee. Together, they struggle with issues of survival and death that are repeated thousands-fold all around them. Alameddine, though, begins to question his right to tell the refugees’ story, and increasingly relies on Mina to tell it for him. In an odd twist, she becomes a first-person narrator who describes to the author what he is experiencing and how he should convey it to his readers. Mina’s story, too, is eventually revealed, and is only one of many LGBTQ threads woven into Alameddine’s beautifully written and crafted novel.
Writers Read: Timothy Jay Smith (May 2019).
My Book, The Movie: The Fourth Courier.
The Page 69 Test: The Fourth Courier.
Q&A with Timothy Jay Smith.
The Page 69 Test: Fire on the Island.
The Page 69 Test: Istanbul Crossing.
Writers Read: Timothy Jay Smith (October 2024).
--Marshal Zeringue