This tender, exuberant novel about a young man navigating coming of age in ’90s San Francisco is for readers of Garth Greenwell and André Aciman.

Walter Simmering is searching for love and purpose in a city he doesn’t realize is fading away—San Francisco in 1993, at the height of the AIDS epidemic and the dawn of the tech revolution. Out of college, out of the closet, and transplanted from the Midwest, Walter is irresistibly drawn from his shell when he meets Cary Menuhin and Sasha Stravinsky, a dynamic couple who live blithely beyond the boundaries of gender and sexuality. Witty and ultra-stylish, Cary and Sasha seem to have stepped straight out of a sultry film noir, captivating Walter through a shared obsession with cinema and Hollywood’s golden age.

As the three embark on adventures across the city, filled with joie de vivre, their lively friendship evolves in unexpected ways. When Walter befriends Lawrence, a filmmaker and former child actor living with HIV, they pursue a film project of their own, with hilarious and tragic results.

Midnight at the Cinema Palace is a vibrant and nostalgic exploration of young souls discovering themselves amidst the backdrop of a disappearing city. Christopher Tradowsky’s astonishing debut captures the essence of ’90s queer culture and the complex lives of friends seeking an aesthetically beautiful and fulfilling way of life.

Christopher Tradowsky lived in San Francisco throughout the 1990s and drew inspiration from his time there for this book. He was also inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, and says that “While Orlando has become the patron saint of gender fluidity, Woolf demonstrated that an entire novel, in both subject and style, could be a love letter from start to finish.” In addition to the J. Michael Samuel Prize from the Lambda Literary Foundation, Tradowsky was also the recipient of the BLOOM Literary Journal Prize for fiction in 2013. He earned a PhD in art history from UCLA. He teaches undergraduate art history and mentors in the creative writing MFA program at Augsburg University in Minneapolis. He lives in St. Paul with his husband.

Lindsay Starck was born in Wisconsin and raised in the Milwaukee Public Library. She is the author of the novels Noah’s Wife (2016) and Monsters We Have Made (2023), which has been named a finalist for the Minnesota Book Awards. Her short prose has appeared in Ploughshares, the New England Review, AGNI, and the Southern Review, among other places, and has been awarded a Pushcart Prize. She currently writes and teaches in Minneapolis, where she lives with her husband and her cattle dog.