Many of the characters in The Days of Anna Madrigal may be from the past, but they fully inhabit a contemporary world. Maupin’s Tales of the City novels are nothing if not a reflection of the times in which they were written, and Anna Madrigal is no exception. Read More
Lamb often leaves his characters on a limb right before changing perspectives, and so we want to read further because of the most basic--and essential--reasons: we need to know what happens next. Read More
"While the juxtaposition of what is told with what is suggested provides a good deal of tension in the novel, we are also gripped by the time and place of Leavitt’s story: Lisbon in the summer 1940, a year into World War II..." Read More
In The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells (Ecco/HarperCollins) Andrew Sean Greer slyly and movingly takes Thomas Wolfe’s observation that “you can’t go home again” and turns it on its head. Read More
"One doesn't think of Burns as courageous or engaged--his great intellect and rather supercilious attitude had let him float above everything -- but writing so explicitly about gays, and advocating for them, in 1947 was an act of enormous courage. "
David Margolick took some time to talk with the Lambda Literary Review about his interest in John Horne Burns, the challenges of writing about a person who was often disliked, and learning about twentieth century gay life. Read More
It’s a sadly familiar story in American literature: an alcoholic gay writer of great talent comes to a tragic end. Think Hart Crane. Think Charles Jackson. And now think John Horne Burns, the subject of David Margolick’s enlightening biography, Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns (Other Press). Read More
In one of Willa Cather's letters to her beloved brother Roscoe she writes, “As for me, I have cared too much, about people and places--cared too hard. It made me as a writer, but it will break me in the end.” Losing those near to her very nearly did break Cather, but it is our great fortune that she let herself care as much as she did. Read More
Blake Bailey has dissected complex, self-destructive literary lives in his biographies of Richard Yates and John Cheever, and Farther and Wilder will no doubt add to his reputation as the premiere chronicler of tormented American writers. Read More
This isn’t a memoir solely about the physical presence of Robert Duncan. It’s also about those who he inspired... Read More
“A lot can happen in a day sometimes,” says Wesley Bowman, one of two teenaged boys at the center of Richard Kramer’s witty and often moving first novel, These Things Happen (Unbridled Books). This opening line, of course, is prescient. A lot does happen in each of the few days that frame this story, in which the adults in Wesley’s life are forced to reevaluate their understanding of themselves. Read More
