When Fritz Peters’s second novel, Finistère, was published by Farrar, Straus and Company in 1951, it was an unlikely hit. A queer bildungsroman set in the 1920s and centered on a young gay man’s exploration of his budding sexuality, the book was far ahead of its time. Yet it sold more than 350,000 copies, according to Peters’s estate, and captured the attention of Gore Vidal, who praised Peters for writing “a novel about a homosexual affair without making either a tract or an apologia.”
Born in 1913, Peters found relative success in his lifetime as a writer of psychological novels with a queer sensibility. And his name would have been familiar to readers of Publishers Weekly in the 1940s and ’50s, when editorial mentions and ads for his books frequently graced the magazine’s pages.
In 1949, PW reported on Peters’s debut, The World Next Door, a fictionalized account of the author’s stay at a mental ward after serving in World War II that presaged today’s autofiction trend. “Farrar, Straus considers Fritz Peters’ The World Next Door a very important first novel and the ‘literary leader’ of the firm’s list,” PW wrote. A month after it published, the novel had gone into a second printing. Two weeks later, it went into a third.
By the following year, Peters had name-brand recognition. In a 1950 article, PW praised Farrar, Straus for introducing “an extraordinary number of new writers to the American reading public,” mentioning Peters in the same breath as Shirley Jackson, Carlo Levi, and Alberto Moravia. In 1951, an advertorial cover from Farrar, Straus again placed Peters at the top of its author list.
Yet today, most of Peters’s books are out-of-print, and their author largely forgotten. He doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. But that could soon change. Peters has found a group of fans and fierce supporters at the Los Angeles–based production company Hirsch Giovanni, founded in 2019 by film veteran David M. Hirsch and cosmetics entrepreneur Giovanni J. Guidotti. And last week, Hirsch Giovanni made its first foray into publishing with the release of five books by Peters: Finistère, The World Next Door, The Descent, and the memoir Boyhood with Gurdjieff and its sequel, Gurdjieff Remembered.
Hirsch and Guidotti knew of Peters through Boyhood with Gurdjieff, Peters’s 1964 memoir about studying under the famed mystic G.I. Gurdjieff, which the pair had long wanted to adapt into a film. When they inquired with the Peters estate about getting the rights, they learned that the rights to all of Peters’s books were available. They leapt at the opportunity.
Films based on Boyhood with Gurdjieff, The World Next Door, and The Descent are now in development. A documentary about Peters’s life, titled Unapologetically Fritz, is in production, and a film adaptation of Finistère is also currently in the works, with a script by British screenwriter Chris Adams.
Impressed not only by the “cinematic potential” of the books but their “literary merit,” and concerned by their waning availability, the company was “motivated to jump into publishing,” said managing editor Alexandra Carbone, who is overseeing the reissue of Peters’s books. All five titles published on June 4 under the banner of the Fritz Peters Collection.
“Much of what Fritz wrote about fascinates the public today,” Carbone said, noting in particular his work’s recurring themes of queerness, mental illness, and spirituality. “His stories are worthy of being kept alive so they can be enjoyed in perpetuity.”
Each paperback book in the series, distributed by Ingram, will include informational afterword and fresh cover designs, and three of the titles feature new introductions. “It was important to us to add value in these ways so as to make the collection more than just a reprint,” Carbone said. All titles will also be available in e-book format and select titles will be available as audiobooks. (actor and David M. Hirsch’s son Emile Hirsch, who in 2015 pled guilty to assaulting a female studio executive, will narrate the audiobooks for for Finistère and Boyhood.)
Author Jack Parlett, who cowrote the introduction to the new edition of Finistère, noted the particular significance of reviving the work of an early queer novelist like Peters. “The canon is a mutable, fickle phenomenon, so many works deemed significant in their own time fall out of print, and therefore outside the reach of public attention,” he said. “This has certainly been true of much queer literature.”
Parlett is the author of Fire Island: A Century in the Life of an American Paradise and a scholar of the history of LGBTQ bestsellers in American literature. He describes Finistère as “a gay novel that sold exceptionally well upon publication, but had fallen off readers’ radars.” A shame, he said, considering the timeliness of its contents.
“A novel like Finistère warns us against complacency in the face of fragile political wins and a shifting contemporary landscape, with transphobia and homophobia on the rise,” Parlett said. He added that despite its 1920s setting and mid-century publication, the story’s themes—“the toxicity of shame, the struggle for self-acceptance, the power of love and companionship”—remain profoundly relevant. Fans of James Baldwin and Garth Greenwell, he said, “would find much to admire in Peters’ novels.”
Along with Parlett, author and Gurdjieff biographer Roger Lipsey was tapped to write the introductions for Boyhood with Gurdjieff and Gurdjieff Remembered. Notably, Henry Miller had written an effusive introduction for previous editions of the memoirs, calling them “a real treasure of our literature.” Carbone said that the series’ introduction writers will serve as vital assets on the publicity front.
Beyond the Fritz Peters Collection, Hirsch Giovanni hopes to continue its publishing efforts alongside its production ventures, though there is no set plan to make that happen just yet. “We have access to other unpublished material, and are interested in operating more in this space,” Carbone said. “There is so much opportunity there, in both directions, books to movies and movies to books.”
Parlett agrees, and said reissues—whether they come from such storied backlist publishers as New York Review Books or the nascent publishing arm of a small film studio—are a “vital part of the literary landscape.” Particularly when it comes to preserving the legacy of queer literature. “These works really mattered to people, and they should matter to us,” he said of forgotten queer classics like Finistère. “A reissue marks a new occasion to connect more closely with our history.”
