Ned Rorem, composer and writer, is both a gifted memoirist and one of our most acerbic cultural commentators. This anthology of his musings on music, people, and life surveys the full range of his literary achievement and reflects the evolution of his sensibilities. The first part of the book is devoted to writing of an autobiographical nature, including ruminations on being alone and on becoming a composer. The second part focuses on music and individuals from Bartok and Ravel to Edith Piaf and the Beatles. The final part consists of portraits and memorials of such figures as Martha Graham, Paul Bowles, Marc Blitzstein, Frank O'Hara, Allen Ginsberg, and Truman Capote. The book also includes a lengthy conversation on the art of the diary.

Ned Rorem is celebrated as one of America's greatest living composers. His diary of his early years, "The Paris Diary and the New York Diary," was widely acclaimed. "The Later Diaries" continues one of the most sustained efforts in the intimate journal form ever undertaken and offers candid insights into his astonishing life, career, art, friendships, and love. In these years, "Lions, Miss Julie," and "Poems of Love and the Rain" were composed and most of his books written; he also continued to meet the famous and infamous and to write of them with the charm that Janet Flanner characterized as "worldly, intelligent, licentious, highly indiscreet."

This latest installment of Ned Rorem's diary opens in 1986, when the author is sixty-two, and closes in 1999, when he is seventy-five. Though Rorem remains as energetic as ever during these years--new books written, new music composed--the tone of this volume is autumnal: His life and his world are winding down. He mourns the passing of dear friends, endures the indignities of growing old, and notes with bitterness the collapse of the taste and standards that once defined his artistic circle. As AIDS becomes an epidemic, he traces its grim course through the gay community and through the discourse of the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton years. "Lies" is an anthology of forms, each entry a carefully chosen, brightly colored tile in a literary mosaic, with all that readers have come to expect from Rorem: erotic fantasies, gratuitous slights, aphorisms, indiscretions, program notes, puns, punditry, and beauty.

When "The Paris Diary" exploded on the scene in 1966 there had never been a book in English quite like it: Its intimate combination of personal, literary, and social insights was unprecedented. Rorem's self-portrait of the artist as a young man, written between 1951 and 1955, was also a mirror of the times, depicting the now vanished milieu of Cocteau, Eluard, Gide, Landowska, Boulez, the Vicomtesse de Noailles, and others whose paths crossed with Rorem's in such settings as Paris, Morocco, and Italy. "The New York Diary," published the following year, pictured the period between 1956 and 1960, when Rorem had returned to America. The diaries marked the beginnings of Gay Liberation, not because Rorem made a special issue of his sexuality, but because he did not; rather, he wrote of his affairs frankly and unashamedly. A casualness informs each sensual entry, and the overall tone is at once bratty and brilliant, insecure and vain, loving and cultured, but, above all, honest and entertaining.