Douglas A. Martin and Elfriede Jelinek

My friend Douglas Martin is translating Jelinek's poetry. . . .

Apr 25, 2026

Douglas Martin at MOMA

I have known Douglas A. Martin for nearly 30 years. He was a student in my very first writing workshops at the New School. He was writing beautiful stories about young queer men trying to make a place for themselves in this world. Sometimes his face shone with specks of glitter.

This was in the late 90’s. I was going through a divorce, and I had a small daughter. Douglas came to my office regularly to talk about films and books. We began a friendship that has been important to me emotionally and intellectually.

He is a truly wonderful writer. In a review in LitHub, Hugh Ryan described Douglas’ first book this way: “Outline of My Lover was a treatise on limerence, obsessive desire for something you can’t have, at least not the way you want. Even in achieving a relationship with his guide star, the unnamed narrator knows nothing will last. His was a rarely articulated position: the cunning pathétique, whose acts of submission are as calculated as they are genuine. He gets what he wants by becoming what is wanted.”

Douglas’ main character is both raw and articulate in his desire: “I am dying for him, in a sense, abandoning childhood and entering it at the same time, a new one, everything over to him and his hands to learn over, start under, again with my idea of who I am.”

His later books — including Branwell, a novel about the complicated Bronte brother — are similarly radiant and passionate. It’s work that often moves over the guard rail into lyrical ecstasy.