Telling Time is a scholarly book that explores how novelists wrote about AIDS during the first decade of the epidemic, when HIV and AIDS were considered death sentences and most often associated with homosexuality and the gay community. The book explores the different narrative strategies used by novelists to represent the temporality of AIDS, looking at Paul Reed's Facing It: a Novel of AIDS, David Feinberg's Eighty-Sixed and Spontaneous Combustion, and Paul Monette's Afterlife and Halfway Home, and how a few novels did manage to resist the apocalyptic dominant rhetoric of AIDS. The book also discusses the difficulties of publishing AIDS novels by people of color and such writers as E. Lynn Harris and Steve Corbin. Telling Time includes a comprehensive annotated bibliography of all American AIDS novels published from 1982-1992 as a reference guide for further reading.