In what’s thought to be the last piece of writing Peter Wells completed before he died, he wonders about his great-grandfather, and the locket he wore all his life. ‘The Story of a Locket’ is published in part here, and features in the extraordinary collection of essays Queer Objects, released this week by Otago University … Read more
All week this week we count down the five best books of 2018. Number three: Peter Wells reviews Calypso by David Sedaris. Many people know the sound of David Sedaris’s voice – high, thin, a drizzle of ironic sound. He himself says he has a “lady voice” and part of his shtick is being mistaken … Read more
The fifth – and final – instalment of Peter Wells’ diary of life with cancer, republished from his private Facebook with permission. Read part one here, part two here, part three here and part four here. April 12, 2:39am I’m back from the dead. The thought struck me today with almost a physical force when I … Read more
The fourth instalment of Peter Wells’ diary of life with cancer, republished from his private Facebook with permission. Read part one here, part two here and part three here. February 20 I’m the luckiest person on earth. I always feel this when I walk into our Napier house. It’s really where Douglas and I are truly … Read more
The third instalment of Peter Wells’ diary of life with cancer, republished from his private Facebook with permission. Read part one here and part two here. January 16, 3:27am I set off on my pilgrimage to the oncology clinic in the spirit of my first day at school, with associated nerves and too much baggage … Read more
The second instalment of Peter Wells’ diary of life with cancer, republished from his private Facebook with permission. Read part one here. December 12, 1:56am The humility of my condition. It’s only when I approach the cancer clinic I see all the other wanderers and strays either coming away or walking in the same direction. … Read more
Acclaimed New Zealand author Peter Wells has been keeping a diary ‘talking about what I saw, was going through, thought’ since his cancer diagnosis. November 15, 10.45am View from my hospital room. In the foreground, the green building is where I flatted with my brother Russell in 1974. Russell was a great stylist and the … Read more
Peter Wells reviews Our Young Man by Edmund White. Can an author write too much? A glance down the inside page of Edmund White’s new novel discloses either a staggering productivity (13 novels, six works of nonfiction, three biographies and four memoirs) or an author’s unstoppable urge to create. His seminal A Boy’s Own Story … Read more
Peter Wells expands on his recent, pathetically small Listener review of What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell to say exactly why he thinks it’s a masterpiece. Once upon a time, and comparatively recently, gay fiction provided a window not only into how gay men lived, but also a portal into the eroticism and interior of our … Read more
Peter Wells reviews Katherine Mansfield’s The Urewera Notebook, edited by Anna Plumridge. The Napier-Taupo road has the high status of being one of those roads on which you lose cellphone coverage. This means you leave behind the 21st Century. You plunge into the uncertainties of real time, presented naked of technology to the landscape. And the landscape itself … Read more
Peter Wells, the director of Samesame but different, the two-day celebration of NZ’s queer writers, on the profound impact of two classic novels. My brother was older than me by two years. He was also gay. He was ahead of me in this, and his adventures both frightened me and lured me forward. Why frighten? Because … Read more
Patricia Highsmith’s second novel The Price of Salt dealt with an obsessive lesbian relationship in an era of homophobia so severe her agent warned of career suicide. Peter Wells reviews the book, reissued and retitled Carol, and finds a ‘daring masterpiece’ which offered a glimmer of hope in the ‘gloom zone’ of the 1950’s. Graham Greene called her ‘the … Read more