Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father (W.W. Norton & Company) by Alysia Abbott manages to pick up the nearly moribund genre of the AIDS memoir, give it a good dusting off, and then send it back out into the world with something like a fighting chance. Read More
Perhaps the best way to approach Christopher Isherwood in America: Middlebrow Queer (University 0f Minnesota Press) by Jaime Harker is one idea...
The Missing Ink, is very much concerned with the loss of individuality and character—a sad phenomenon that has been brought about by, among other things, the dominance of the keyboard. Read More
“We were put in the mood for ghosts….”
So begins what has been called one of Edith Wharton’s finest short stories, “The Eyes.” “The Eyes” is a psychological fable artfully disguised as a Gothic ghost story, and as such “The Eyes” warns its readers, among other things, against the personal consequences of denying one’s sexuality. Read More
"On Being Different: What It Means to Be Homosexual” is an essay the writer Merle Miller published in The New York Times Magazine two years after the 1969 Stonewall Riots, a time when the newspaper used the word gay, but only in quotation marks. Read More
LGBT bibliophiles will recognize New York Review Books (NYRB) Classics as the press that could—but doesn’t—boast about its impressive catalogue of LGBT-interest titles. Edwin Frank founded the press in 1999 as the publishing house of The New York Review of Books and serves as the imprint's Editorial Director.
Frank kindly agreed to participate in an exclusive interview with the Lambda Literary Review. Read More
[....]Any literature that cares to address the queer desire to marry among gay men and women will have a lot on its shoulders, maybe even more than literature about AIDS ever did. Read More
Reading exactly 95 of the Modern Library’s 100 Best English-Language Novels of the Twentieth Century is a project I’ve often...
The Rhyming Dictionary, Leather Porn & Barbara Streisand’s “Evergreen”: My Week with Agha Shahid Ali
"...if we 've never heard Shahid’s name mentioned much in circles of gay literati, it's largely due to the fact that each passing month sees the release of more and more volumes of poetry, and possibly just as many anthologies, more and more of them written and compiled by out gay men. From this perspective, Shahid can get lost in the shuffle. But if you knew Shahid, or if you admire any of the work he left behind, you’ll know he can’t, he won’t be lost..." Read More
History of a Pleasure Seeker—Mason’s fourth novel at the age of 34—is extremely well-written, extremely well-paced and so intricately plotted that it’s no surprise to learn that Mason clearly outlines his novels before he even begins to haggle with his first sentence Read More
