Tom Spanbauer

TOM SPANBAUER was born in a trunk in the Princess Theater in Pocatello, Idaho. Not really. The Princess Theater wasn’t anymore by the time he came on the scene. He went to Catholic School until the eighth grade and then to Pocatello High School, then graduated from the newly finished Highland High. Five years at Idaho State University and he received a BA in English with a minor in German. In 1969 Tom went into the Peace Corps and he spent two years in Kenya, East Africa. Then came the 70s and the Married Years in Boise, Idaho. In 1978, Tom set himself free and moved to New England, then Key West, the finally settled in New York City for seven years. Tom, a survivor of AIDS, has lived and worked in Portland for fifteen years where he teaches Dangerous Writing. His novels include Faraway Places, The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon, In The City of Shy Hunters, and Now Is The Hour.

Books

I Loved You More

A Novel

For fans of The Marriage Plot and Freedom, I Loved You More is a rich, expansive tale of love, sex, and heartbreak from the late great Tom Spanbauer

At the heart of Tom Spanbauer’s novel is a love triangle: two men, one woman. In New York, Ben forms a bond of love with his macho friend and foil, Hank. Years later in Portland, a now ill Ben falls for Ruth, who provides the care and devotion he needs, though they cannot find true happiness together—and as Ben has found out with Hank, loving has its limits. Then Hank reappears and meets Ruth, and real trouble starts.

Set against a world of writers and artists; New York’s Lower East Side in the wild 1980s; the drab, confining Idaho of Ben’s youth; Portland in his middle age; and many places in between, the complex world revealed in I Loved You More—written in the poisoned, lyrical voice of Ben—is the author’s most complex and wise novel to date.

Faraway Places

A Novel

A vivid, hypnotic debut from 1988—now beautifully repackaged with a preface by the author and an introduction by A.M. Holmes—chronicling a thirteen-year-old boy in 1950s Idaho whose witnessing of a murder leads to a false accusation of a Black man that forever changes his view of his family and the world

During a fateful summer, 13-year-old Jake Weber witnesses the brutal murder of a Native American woman by the town banker. Jake's parents forbid him to speak of the killing or name its perpetrator, even as the woman's African American lover stands falsely accused. The crime and what follows it forever alter Jake's view of his parents and the world around him. Faraway Places won widespread praise for its vivid narrative and incantatory style, and Spanbauer displays singular skill in inhabiting the mind of a troubled adolescent boy.