The Thread

Christophe Bourdin was certain he would be the author of a single book. Diagnosed HIV-positive at the height of the epidemic in Paris, he began writing the exquisitely beautiful, painfully intense pages that would become The Thread.It begins with the hypochondriac days: days of obsessive hygiene, of microscopic attention to contamination, of seeing dangers everywhere. In serpentine sentences that capture the frenzied paranoia of the time, Bourdin recreates the consciousness of a young gay man whose world has suddenly become charged with threat. With his illness becoming manifest, the man writes a diary to record the passing of his final days. Beginning with searing intensity, the entries gradually become mixed with currents of fantasy and visions of an alternative future.First published in 1994, The Thread is appearing in English for the first time in a stunning translation by the prize-winning Jeffrey Zuckerman. Lucid and moving, it is an essential lost classic of AIDS literature.



Christophe Bourdin was born in Épinal, France in 1964. As a young literature student in Paris, he learned that was HIV-positive and began to write a journal. Over the next several years, this text would become the autobiographical novel, The Thread, which was first published in 1994. Highly acclaimed, it was republished in 1996, and sections from the novel were read on the radio and on stage for World AIDS Day that year. Bourdin died in 1997, aged 32.Jeffrey Zuckerman is a translator of books by the artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and the Dardenne brothers, the queer writers Jean Genet and Hervé Guibert, and the Mauritian novelists Ananda Devi and Shenaz Patel. He has won the French Voices Grand Prize and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and, for the entirety of his work, he was named a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.