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5 Minutes, 5 Questions With… Larry Benjamin, author of Damaged Angels

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JoeyPinkney.com Exclusive Interview
5 Minutes, 5 Questions With…
Larry Benjamin, author of “Damaged Angels”
(Beaten Track)

larry_benjamin_damaged_angels_250

“Damaged Angels” is my first collection of short fiction. The stories give voice to the invisible, the damaged: the drug addicts and hustlers, the mentally ill and the sick and the questioning and the men who fall in love with them.

Often dark, always lyrical and evocative, these stories are the stories of those who color, and love, outside the lines.

Joey Pinkney: Where did you get the inspiration to write “Damaged Angels”?

Larry Benjamin: In the acknowledgements, I wrote”…to all the men and boys who inspired these stories—you gave your all. I hope I gave as much.” And that really was my inspiration—the men and boys I’ve met along the way. In some cases they were friends, in others, just casual acquaintances, in one instance it was my brother and some were much, much more to me. Continue reading 5 Minutes, 5 Questions With… Larry Benjamin, author of Damaged Angels →

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5 Minutes, 5 Questions With… Larry Benjamin, author of What Binds Us

JoeyPinkney.com Exclusive Interview
5 Minutes, 5 Questions With…
Larry Benjamin, author of What Binds Us
(Carina Press)

What Binds Us is, at its heart, an inter-racial love story although race does not play a significant role. Because the characters’ difference in race and social class and sexuality creates no conflict, the story becomes a universal story—of love, of loss, of family.

When, at 17, Thomas-Edward escapes southern New Jersey and the tyranny of his parents love, he thinks he is ready for anything. Anything quickly arrives in the form of one Donovan Dion “Dondi” Whyte who is like no one he has ever met before and who introduces him into “a looking-glass world in which everything was familiar yet larger, more exquisite, more precious than anything he had ever known.”

Dondi is sophisticated, passionate, urbane—the man Thomas-Edward has dreamed of loving since childhood and yet it is not Dondi but rather his brother, Matthew, in whom he finds the love he has dreamed of.

Joey Pinkney: Where did you get the inspiration to write What Binds Us?

Larry Benjamin: I was inspired to write it after seeing Jonathan Demme’s “Philadelphia” which I thought didn’t do a very good job of portraying the Continue reading 5 Minutes, 5 Questions With… Larry Benjamin, author of What Binds Us →