The literati meet the glitterati at The Red Fez

Award-winning author Joseph Olshon (Clara's Heart, The Night Swimmer) talks like a New Yorker and currently lives in Vermont. But when Bay Windows spoke with him about his upcoming reading at The Red Fez, where he'll appear with fellow author Maureen Freely (Enlightenment), he was quick to remind me that one of the South End restaurant's amenities is parking in the back.

It figures that Olshon would know these things, and not just because he's "a huge fan of Boston (though he lives in Vermont "because living in a city can be very distracting.") In his latest novel, The Conversion, Olshon commands a rich texture and powerful sense of place in a story about writers struggling with the conflicting demands of love and ambition. In fact, the area of Italy where most of the novel takes place was crucial to the book's genesis.

"Every time I write a book, I try to write about something I don't think that anyone else can write about," explains Olshon. "I don't think my experiences in Europe could rival that of a European writer, unless I wrote about an American abroad, and that's been done. So I began with a villa where I spent an enormous amount of time. I felt this was a place I could write about with real authority. So the villa itself is like a character."

Olshon's protagonist, a wanna-be writer who's become something of a literary hanger-on, retreats to that Tuscan villa, which is home to a pair of famous Italian writers, to nurse his wounds after a series of disastrous relationships. He also ponders what to do with the manuscript of his recently-deceased lover's memoirs. Russell knows that Ed wouldn't want his memoirs published until he had finished them, but does he owe the world of literature more than he owes Ed? Olshon uses this seemingly simple story to explore the complicated relationships between writers and their work, as well as the tangled emotions between writers.

Although none of the major characters are closely modeled on anyone Olshon knows, this is clearly a world he is familiar with. And when it comes to hard feelings between writers, Olshon reveals that truth can be stranger than fiction.

"I used to be a pretty prominent book reviewer," he expands, "and I got burned. There are people that just cannot take criticism. There's one prominent gay writer whose book I didn't like, and people were mad at me about that for years afterwards. To the point where I couldn't get one of my own books reviewed." (He returning to book reviewing after a hiatus with a new policy: If you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all.)

If there's any controversy in Olshon's future, it could come from his sympathetic treatment of how his character Russell, easily led by love, knowingly exposes himself to HIV. Exploring why gay men take such risks was another of the novel's primary inspirations.

Because his work doesn't necessarily get pigeonholed as gay fiction, he "wanted to try to make the general public understand this...that when you're under the spell of love you can forget your priorities and not take care of yourself. There can be a confusion about intimacy and what you want to do and what you want to share. I was trying to give a nuanced, realistic view of people who get into that situation."

Joe Olshan and Maureen Freely read at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, May 14 at Red Fez, 1222 Washington St., Boston.