Readings at Parkside:
Charlie Porter
The Parkside Lounge
317 East Houston Street
New York City
Sunday, October 19th, 4pm
Readings at Parkside is honored to welcome Charlie Porter back to The Parkside Lounge to mark the launch of Nova Scotia House, from Nightboat Books.
Charlie Porter is a writer, fashion critic, and curator. His debut novel, Nova Scotia House, will be published in the US by Nightboat Books in October 2025. His other books are What Artists Wear and Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion. He has written for the Financial Times, the Guardian, The New York Times, GQ, Luncheon, i-D and Fantastic Man, and has been described as one of the most influential fashion journalists of his time. Porter co-runs the London queer rave Chapter 10, and is a trustee of the Friends of Arnold Circus, where he is also a volunteer gardener. He lives in London.
Portrait: Sarah Lee
In this profound meditation on grief, Johnny looks back at his relationship with his life partner, Jerry, after his AIDS-related death. When they met, nearly thirty years ago, Johnny was 19, Jerry was 45. They made a life on their own terms in Jerry’s flat: 1, Nova Scotia House. Johnny is still there today—but Jerry is gone, and so is the world they knew.
As Johnny’s mind travels between then and now, he begins to remember stories of Jerry’s youth: of experiments in living; of radical philosophies; of the many possibilities of love, sex and friendship before the AIDS crisis devastated the queer community. Slowly, he realizes what he must do next— and attempts to restore ways of being that could be lost forever.
Nova Scotia House takes us to the heart of a relationship, a community and an era. It is both a love story and a lament; bearing witness to the enduring pain of the AIDS pandemic and honouring the joys and creativity of queer life. Intimate, visionary, and profoundly original, it marks the debut of a vibrant new voice in contemporary fiction, and a writer with a liberating new story to tell.
An extraordinary work of the imagination . . . There is so much heart and longing in it that fills my soul.
-Hilton Als
A softly inspiring book about lived history and time and, always, love.
-Eileen Myles
This book occupies the spaces, the lives in between, the connections we make, the memories still happening in our heads, our bodies’ responsibility to the state we put them in, growing, lusting, dying, reviving, sold on, the ruins of our lives, the communities of our past, another kind of economy, of sex and loss and weeds and words, this work of genius, Nova Scotia House.
-Philip Hoare
I didn’t want to let this book go. The way it reveals its narrator, and its secrets—the pockets of emotion and memory that we half-hide from ourselves—is astonishing.
-Nate Lippens
Surely the tenderest of AIDS novels . . . It makes the always radical argument that play is more important than work. At heart, it’s a queer manifesto, proclaiming the value of queer experience and soul.
-Robert Glück