Books To Consider Reading

This is the list of books that the Pat Parker/Vito Russo Library book discussion group is considering reading. In general, we only read books that are currently in print and that are in paperback. The list is arranged alphabetically by author. A list of hardbound books that we'll consider reading in the future appears at the end.

Return to the Book Club list of books we've already read.

A SLIGHT TRICK OF THE MIND

by Mitch Cullin (fiction, Talese/Doubleday)
Paperback $14, (2005) 272 pages

Sherlock Holmes is now 93, and his singularly acute memory has begun to fall away in patches. Three narrative threads tie together this throughtful novel by out writer Mitch Cullin: Holme's obsessive beekeeping, in which he is assisted by his housekeeper's beautiful son, a journey to postwar Japan with an eginmatic gay host, and the ever-enticing story within-a-story, here contained in a manuscript the boy unearths in the detective's study. The prose mirrors Holme's preference for the intellectual over the emotional, lending it a slightly detached air. But what unfolds is a moving meditation on memory and loss.

THE LETTERS OF NOEL COWARD

by Noel Coward, Edited by Barry Day (letters, Vintage)
Paperback $20 (paperback March 2009) 800 pages

Writers labor to come up with lines half as good as those Coward dropped into the mailbox every day. The playwright, actor and songwriter is in fine form in these missives, telegrams and poems (he would rhyme almost anything, even communications to his business manager), presented along with return mail from friends. The well-chosen selections appear in chronological order with some unobtrusive narrative context; at times the editor spotlights a lifelong correspondence with a single person to flesh out Coward's relationships. Coward's voice is charming, whimsical, sharp-eyed and canny, often alternating between effusive warmth (letter to Tallulah Bankhead: Thank you very much, darling, for all your sweetness and your insane generosity) and cutting putdown (letter about Tallulah Bankhead: a conceited slut). A true intellectual of the stage, his comments on the nitty-gritty of writing, pacing, character and acting technique are incisive. Theater fans will be fascinated, but casual readers will also find an entertaining browse.

DARK REFLECTIONS

by Samuel R. Delany (fiction, Carrol & Graf)
Paperback $16 (paperback March 2007) 320 pages

Delany's new novel is a triptych -- a biography, in reverse, of a poet we see at three stages in life. On the first panel, a decrepit writer is dining with his young editor; on the second, a middle-aged groom searches for sex in a public restroom on his wedding night; in the third, a college boy falls in love. The figure in all three scenes is a man who, whenever he finds photographs of himself, invariably turns them over and writes on the back, "The poet Arnold Hawley." More specifically, Arnold Hawley is a black, gay poet who lives in Manhattan's East Village. Dark Reflections is a sort of love letter to that part of town, when it sheltered the homeless and the hustler in a way it no longer does. Arnold's triple minority status as gay, black, and a poet inspires Delany's finely nuanced meditation on the challenges and the changing roles faced by society's outsiders in what is one of his most masterfully written novels to date.

THE SEALED LETTER

by Emma Donoghue (Novel, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
paperback $15 (paperback Sept 2009) 416 pages

In 1864 London, Helen, now the wife of Vice-Admiral Codrington, bumps into her old friend Emily Faithful, now a well-known feminist and independent printer. As Donoghue deliciously unspools the twisted roots of their intimacy, Emily soon finds herself party to Helen's clandestine affair and snared in the sensational divorce proceedings that ensue (and which are based on an actual case from the period). Donoghue's elegantly styled, richly woven tale absorbs the everyday lives of Victorian women (rich, poor, working, home-bound, feminist, adulteress) and men (officer, lawyer, minister, adulterer, even an amateur detective) in a colorful tapestry of spiraling intrigue, innuendo, speculation and mystery. Period details—etiquette, typesetting, dress, medical treatments, public amusements, shipping and jurisprudence—are rendered with a spare exactitude organic to the story. Stonewall aware nominee 2009.

LIGHT FELL

by Evan Fallenberg (Novel, Soho Press)
paperback $12 (paperback Jan 2009) 240 pages

Professor Joseph Licht invites his five adult sons to celebrate his 50th birthday in 1996 Tel Aviv and he hopes to win his boys' love and forgiveness. From that opening, Joseph's life unfolds in retrospect: 20 years earlier, as a married father of five, Joseph discovers he is gay as he falls in love with a charismatic rabbi. The rabbi kills himself after the affair, and a crushed Joseph jettisons his marriage and adherence to Modern Orthodox Judaism. The familial repercussions are extreme, leaving Joseph's wife bereft and his sons with a lack of trust. While the lovemaking is sentimentalized, and Joseph's and one son's homosexual awakenings seem abrupt, Fallenberg's descriptions of Israeli life are credible and absorbing. Winner of the Publishing Triangle's 2008 Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction.

HAVE YOU HEARD

by Anderson Ferrell (novel, Bloomsbury)
Paperback $15 (April 2004) 288 pages

In the tradition of the great Southern storytellers, Have You Heard explores a small town torn apart by scandal. Pulitzer-prize nominee, Anderson Ferrell offers a sprawling, atmospheric tale of the American South. The attempted murder of a right-wing North Carolina senator throws a sudden media spotlight onto the alleged would-be assassin -- Jerry Chiffon, who just happened to be sporting a red ladies' suit, a wig, and a fake Chanel purse at the time -- and onto Jerry's tiny hometown of Branch Creek, NC. As three separate narrators relate slightly differing versions of the story, the pieces start to come together.

THE TORTURER'S WIFE

by Thomas Glave (nine short stories, City Light Publishers)
paperback $16 (paperback Jan 2009) 240 pages

Glave's second collection is a disquieting, graphic, semiexperimental compendium examining violence and ignorance in and out of wartime. After opening with a contemporary relationship drama, Glave makes the jarring transition to armed conflicts, invasion and genocide. What most unifies these works is what's left unsaid—secrets are a constant, and there are virtually no names. Glave's style, full of interruptions, ellipses, unconventional text treatments and poemlike breaks, sends each story whirling thickly toward its end: in the title story, a woman called She is haunted by grotesque nightmares of dismembered body parts raining on her house and garden, after discovering her high-ranking husband's wartime atrocities. One story takes a step back to focus on a couple, telling the story of two racist gay men in an interracial relationship with surprising twists.

THE CARNIVOROUS LAMB

by Agustin Gomez-Arcos, new translation by Sharon G. Feldman (novel, Arsenal Pulp Press)
paperback $17 (France 1975, first translation 1984, new translation Dec 2007) 272 pages

The latest in the Little Sister's Classics series resurrecting gay and lesbian literary gems: a viciously funny, shocking yet ultimately moving 1975 novel, an allegory of Franco's Spain, about a young gay man (the self-described "carnivorous lamb") coming of age with a mother who despises him, a father who ignores him, and a brother who loves him. Author Agustin Gomez-Arcos left his native Spain for France in the 1960s to escape its censorship policies. The Carnivorous Lamb won the Prix Hermes its 1984 English translation was widely acclaimed. "Delicious in its anarchist subversiveness, titillating in its blasphemous transgressions, incisive in its droll irony, The Carnivorous Lamb deserves a place in our libraries as a work of protest against the social and political conventions that circumscribe our lives."Gay & Lesbian Review

LOVING MONSTERS

by James Hamilton-Paterson (novel, Granta)
Paperback $15 (May 2003) 308 pages

Hamilton-Paterson is a prolific author including the Whitbread Prize-winning novel "Gerontius" and the current British best-seller (and 2004 Man Booker Award long-list nominee) "Cooking with Fernet Branca". Taking place in Tuscany and Egypt before WWII, "Loving Monsters" is about JayJay, the dying elderly man who talks James, the reluctant narrator, into writing his life story, promising that it will be "peculiar, exotic, erotic..." JayJay is raised in a middle-class, repressive British household, but when he goes to Egypt in 1936 to take a clerical job, he finds his destiny among the shadowy figures of Cairo as a purveyor of pornography who occasionally smuggles drugs. Despite his dubious occupation, JayJay proves to be an eloquent and mysterious subject who moves in interesting circles as he engages in a variety of bisexual affairs. When the project stalls, James takes a brief hiatus to pursue another literary endeavor, but when he returns JayJay surprises him by revealing the story of the love of his life, a British schoolboy whom he never approached (shades of A.E. Housman). The novel closes with JayJay describing his attachment to an Italian family during the war years that led to his settling in Tuscany. The denouement is rich with poignant insights and the narrative reveals an interesting character study in a rarely explored setting.

WE DISAPPEAR

by Scott Heim (novel, Harper Perennial)
paperback $14 (paperback Feb 2008) 293 pages

In his psychologically disturbing third novel, Heim (Mysterious Skin) again focuses his vision on the relentlessly bleak Kansas prairie, where for years children have been disappearing. It's a maniacal source of fascination for recently widowed Donna, who has created a shrine to the missing children, papering her home and truck with their images. When the corpse of the latest missing teenager is discovered, Donna summons her son Scott home from Manhattan to help unravel the circumstances of the boy's disappearance. Arriving to find his mother losing her battle with cancer, Scott, a gay crystal-meth addict, soon realizes that the only thing keeping his mother alive is her obsession—one, she reveals, that began with her own abduction as a child. As Scott gets drawn deeper into his mother's fixation, the lines between reality and delusion become suspiciously and dangerously obscured.

NOT WITHOUT LAUGHTER

by Langston Hughes (novel, Dover 2008)
paperback $4 (originally published 1930 but never out of print) 242 pages

A leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance, poet Hughes wrote only one novel — but it is an incredibly powerful and moving work. This 1930s coming-of-age tale, which unfolds amid an African-American family in rural Kansas, explores the dilemmas of life in a racially divided society. Maya Angelou wrote: "This book was written when preachers had to be poets and poets were preachers, because they needed to be available to all the people all the time. The messages this novel gives are not subtle. But, through its varied perspectives and eloquently written prose, it envelops the issues it preaches with emotionally edifying ideas. It leaves the reader with a feeling of deep connection to all the characters, particularly the beautiful Sandy in whom we invest our hope and trust to fulfil his potential to become a good, intelligent and strong man who does not feel limited by his racial heritage despite any restrictions society may attempt to place for him."

MY LUCKY STAR

by Joe Keenan (novel, Back Bay Books)
paperback $14 (paperback Nov 2006) 361 pages

The glamorous Hollywood novel gets a sharp send-up as a smart drawing-room comedy crossed liberally with farce in this third offering from a successful television writer (Frazier). Struggling playwrights Philip and Claire are summoned to Tinseltown by their calculating friend Gilbert to be screenwriters for a legendary diva, Diana Malenfant, and her megastar son, Stephen Donato. When the budding screenwriters are revealed as inadvertent plagiarists, Philip is forced to ghostwrite the memoirs of Diana's toxic has-been sister, Lily, and turn over all potentially damaging pages to Diana and Stephen. Lily is threatening to expose the silver screen's best-kept secret, that Stephen is gay. All are coexisting in a glittery detente until L.A.'s most fashionable madam gets the goods on the entire cast and demands a production credit, prodding the ever-capable Claire to devise the most madcap of rescues.

THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS

by Urusula Le Guin (originally published 1969)
paperback $14 (Ace Trade paperback, 2000) 320 pages

Le Guin's vision of a genderless planet is as radical today as it was in 1969, and the novel has never been out of print since its publication. On her imagined planet Gethen, people take on gender only when they have sex, and sex occurs only during a prescribed period called kemmering -- a kind of heat for people. While the book was hailed by feminists for its suggestion that equality was rooted in shared responsibility for childbearing, it also marked one of the first articulations of gender as fluid and relational. As Genly Ai, our emissary from a galaxy far away, comes to know these strange creatures, he finds that sex and gender persist, even at the periphery. This is no utopian fantasy -- division and treachery remain -- but Le Guin opens a windw on the expansive possibilities for love, work, and community that might come from seeing each other first as simply and plainly human.

ZAMI: A NEW SPELLING OF MY NAME

by Audre Lorde (memoir-biography, she calls it mythobiography, Crossing Press)
Paperback $17 (December 1983) 256 pages

Audre Lorde, best known for her gifted poetry and essays, leaves us with this striking autobiography of her early years as a writer, and as a struggling black lesbian in NYC. Slowly, through gentle inflections of her Grenadian roots and development of the ideas of Caricou society, she stitches together a number of very personal 'mythographies,' ultimately weaving a passionate, touching and mythic telling of her life. Voted #8 on the Publishing Triangle's list of 100 best lesbian and gay non-fiction books.

OF HUMAN BONDAGE,
THE RAZOR'S EDGE, or
CAKES AND ALE

by William Somerset Maugham

Although Maugham rarely spoke publicly about his sexuality, he has been embraced as one of the most renowned gay or bisexual authors of all time. "I was a quarter normal and three-quarters queer, but I tried to persuade myself it was the other way round," he once said. "That was my greatest mistake." Maugham did not feature prominent gay or lesbian characters in his works, although he did occasionally include ambiguously queer minor figures. He remained publicly circumspect about his sexuality throughout his life, possibly because, as the American novelist, Glenway Wescott, pointed out, "Willie's generation lived in mortal terror of the Oscar Wilde trial." While married and a father, he lived openly with male companions - a lifestyle that could hardly go unnoticed due to his fame - he burned his unpublished manuscripts before his death in 1965.

OF HUMAN BONDAGE (700 pages): Generally agreed to be his masterpiece and to be strongly autobiographical. Philip Care, an orphan is brought up by his aunt and uncle to take a vocation in the church; however, he defies his uncle and makes an important decision to leave his studies and follow an uncertain path to discover where his true potential lies. He tries accountancy and art, but settles on becoming a doctor. On his journey he becomes more aware of the complexities and inconsistencies of human nature and that striving for the unachievable may only lead him to an unhappy life.

THE RAZOR'S EDGE (300 pages): Follows the spiritual and physical journey of Larry Darrell, a sensitive, intelligent young man who refuses to conform to the prevailing social norms of post-World War I America. Instead of marrying a rich, pretty Chicago girl, he goes to Paris searching for answers to questions about man, God and the meaning of life. This leads to stops in Germany, Spain and India, the latter destination finally answering some of his questions through the teachings of Eastern spiritual men. While Larry is traveling and searching for answers, his former fiancee, Isabel, marries someone because of money instead of love, and she must deal with the effects of the stock market crash. They meet up again in Paris, completely different people. Larry has found peace, while Isabel, a socialite is more interested in money than love.

CAKES AND ALE (325 pages): A thinly-veiled roman a clef examining contemporary novelists Thomas Hardy and Hugh Walpole. The story is told by a first-person narrator and well-to-do author who, at the beginning of the novel is suddenly and unexpectedly contacted by a busy-body literary figure in London who has been asked by to write the biography of her deceased husband. A very clever novel of reveal and not revealing information.

THE FIRST VERSE

by Barry McCrea (novel, Carroll & Graf)
Paperback $15 (paperback May 2005) 320 pages

Niall is thrilled to have obtained a prestigious scholarship to study at Trinity College in Dublin. He is looking forward to tasting the delights of the big city, at last able to leave his unhurried life with his parents. It doesn't take long for Niall to settle into both the sacred halls of Trinity College and the wild gay nightlife of Dublin. As Niall dives into new experiences, he falls into a cult that makes a game and, eventually, a dangerous addiction of signs and secrets its members derive from literature, e-mail, and text-messaging. Set in Paris and Dublin, McCrea's gay Gen X opus delivers sharp pacing and a sense of place colored by the state of mind that leads a young man to lose a year of his life to sexual pursuits. Winner 2005 Triangle Publishing Award for fiction (Ferro-Grumley Award).

HOW BEAUTIFUL IT IS AND HOW EASILY IT CAN BE BROKEN

by Daniel Mendelsohn (essays, Harper, 2008)
Paperback $17 (paperback Aug 2009) 480 pages

Elegant essays, mostly from the NY Review of Books, in which a classicist looks at contemporary culture, from movies like Kill Bill to Broadway musicals like The Producers, and the novels Middlesex and Everyman. Includes discussions of works from Pedro Almodóvar to Brokeback Mountain, from United 93 and World Trade Center to 300, Marie Antoinette, and The Hours. They are springboards for Mendelsohn's agile mind to examine subjects like gender, homosexuality, war and peace. In a magisterial essay, Mendelsohn finds the same flaw in the blockbuster movie Troy that he believes marred the ancient Greek epics. These essays richly repay the time readers spend in their company.

SELECTED POEMS BY FRANK O'HARA

by Frank O'Hara, New edition and notes by Mark Ford (poetry, Alfred A Knopf)
Paperback $18 (paperback Sept 2009) 265 pages

Frank O'Hara (1926–1966) was one of the most original and influential American poets of the twentieth century. O'Hara developed into the quintessential poet of mid-century Manhattan; soon after his arrival in New York in 1951 he evolved a new kind of urban poetry that brilliantly captures the heady excitements of a golden period in the city's artistic life. O'Hara was at the heart of a vibrant artistic circle that embraced fellow New York School poets John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler, as well as experimental painters such as Willem de Kooning and Jasper Johns. Their achievements are movingly celebrated in many of his poems, while at the same time he paid loving tribute to popular idols such as James Dean and Lana Turner. This generous new selection by Mark Ford reflects all the phases and varied achievements of O'Hara's tragically foreshortened career.

THE CONVERSION

by Joseph Olshan (Novel, St. Martin's Press)
Paperback $15 (paperback June 2009) 304 pages

Olshan's satisfying new Jamesian novel follows American translator Russell Todaro, a Jewish gay man who becomes embroiled in the death and scandal of a former lover. While in France with Ed, a well-known poet, they are attacked by two armed men. The men mysteriously flee when Ed confronts them; but Ed dies of a heart attack the following morning. Marina, an aging literary acquaintance of Ed's, provides a haven for Russell at her picturesque Tuscan villa. Marina frets that the men who assaulted Russell in Paris may have been looking for her reclusive husband, a controversial writer. Meanwhile, Annie, the executrix of Ed's literary estate, demands to know the whereabouts of the autobiographical manuscript he'd spent the last 10 years penning. Russell denies he has it, though when Ed's writings re-emerge, the lines of truth become blurred. Lambda Literary Award nominee 2008.

SEND ME

by Patrick Ryan (novel, Dial Press Trade Paperback)
paperback $13 (paperback January 2007) 320 pages

Ryan's debut novel follows Teresa Kerrigan as she struggles to raise four children from her two failed marriages. The novel covers 30 years from the mid-1960s. By the '70s, the family is in Florida, with NASA launches nearby. The youngest son Frankie can't shake his boyhood obsession with spaceships and as an adolescent Frankie happily embraces his gayness, dreaming wistfully of Luke Skywalker. Next oldest Joe, who narrates some chapters, has a more painful time sorting through his own messy sexuality, while the eldest, Matt, leaves at 18 to care for his sick father, and Karen, a high school dropout, marries at 21 and withdraws from her mother—as each child does in his or her own way. Ryan does not tie up loose ends but paints a powerful picture of dysfunction intertwined with humor, love, and hope.

THE CHILD

by Sarah Schulman (fiction, Carroll & Graf)
paperback $18 (paperback September 2008) 304 pages

The age of consent provides the flash point for Schulman's disturbing eighth novel. The online activities of Stew —15, gay and troubled—lead him straight into the arms of David, 39, and his lover, Joe. The two are subsequently arrested for child molestation. Schulman, a noted playwright and lesbian activist, examines, with unflinching precision, the aftermath for Stew—his unhappy relationship with his family and the mental deterioration that leads to the senseless murder of Stew's young nephew. But if Stew is tried as an adult for murder, should the child molestation charge against David and Joe be dismissed? David's gay lawyer, who's struggling with AIDS, turns for help to a longtime friend and fellow lawyer who's depressed, estranged from her partner and worried about cancer. Schulman crafts a piercing investigation into desire, mores and the law.

CINNAMON GARDENS

by Shyam Selvadurai (novel, South Asia Books)
paperback $20 (paperback 1998) 390 pages

(Young Adult) Ceylon in 1927 is a fragrant, lush, and beautiful city. For the Kandiah family--a mother and three young daughters living in the exclusive Cinnamon Gardens suburb--it is also politically complex and heading irreversibly into an unknowable future. The eldest daughter wants to be a teacher but according to the rules of her time and society, she must relinquish that work if she marries. Negotiating the illusory pathways of romantic hopefulness, she ultimately makes some surprisingly mature choices. In counterpoint to Annalukshmi's story is that of her uncle; he loves his wife and his son but continues to struggle with his homosexuality and is thrown into crisis when his old lover retunrs. Selvadurai portrays the national and international, religious, political, historical, and cultural controversies of a much larger stage.

NOW IS THE HOUR

by Tom Spanbauer (novel, Houghton Mifflin)
paperback $15 (paperback June 2007) 459 pages

Spanbauer follows his well-received The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon with a risky bildungsroman, a straightforward but luminous tale of a country boy's self-liberation. In 1967, 17-year-old Rigby John is hitchhiking from Idaho to San Francisco to escape a life of religious, racial and sexual bigotry. He leaves behind a pregnant girlfriend, a mystified mother, an embittered father and a sister trapped in a brutal marriage. As he waits for a ride, he winds the story back to his childhood, then virtually walks through a life marked by hard farm work, Catholic guilt and the liberating passion of deep friendships formed with scandalously disreputable people of the community. His astonishment at other people keeps his story edgy and warm, without allowing it to be sentimental.

A PERFECT WAITER

by Alain Claude Sulzer, translated by John Brownjohn (novel, Bloomsbury)
Paperback $13 (paperback Jan 2009) 224 pages

This unique little novel is the first by this Swiss novelist to be translated into English. Sulzer has achieved an intense character study in creating the perfect waiter, Erneste. The novel is set in 1966, and middle-aged Erneste is demonstrating his professional skills at a high-end Swiss resort hotel, with no life outside his work. But in a series of flashbacks that took place 30 years prior, Erneste describes coming out of his shell to train another young man to be a perfect waiter and even entered into an affair with him. Then one day, the appearance of a letter from that young man, who broke Erneste's heart, compels him to step out of his set routines. A spare, elegant, controlled, and poignant psychological study.

AMONG OTHER THINGS, I'VE TAKEN UP SMOKING

by Aoibheann Sweeney (debut novel, Penguin Press, 2007)
paperback $14 (paperback June 2008) 223 pages

Miranda is an infant when her parents move from New York City to an island off the coast of Maine so her father can complete a translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. When her mother takes a boat to town and never returns, Miranda is raised by her reclusive father. She grows up in solitude, save for a friendship with Mr. Blackwell, a local fisherman. After Miranda graduates from high school, her father arranges for her to return to New York to work in the library that he helped establish years before her birth. There, Miranda begins unraveling the mysteries of her father's past, the disappearance of her mother, and her father's possibly gay relationship with Mr. Blackwell, while pushing through her isolation to discover her own path in life and love.

WHAT I DID WRONG

by John Weir (novel, Viking Adult)
paperback $14 (Mar 2007) 256 pages

Weir (author of 1990's The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket) presents a follow-up novel of a middle-aged professor, Tom, who survived his 20s and 30s in a New York ravaged by AIDS, and now encounters a lifetime of demons during one jam-packed day in 2000. Tom's straight friend Richie, thinking he may be out of his depth on an AOL date, brings Tom along to chaperone. As the two navigate the five boroughs, Tom takes ponders the wisdom of falling for a thuggish yet sensitive straight student, and rehashes his love affairs with a suave older man and a street-smart girl. Tom is haunted by friends lost to AIDS, particularly an ACT-UP activist.

FROM BOYS TO MEN: GAY MEN WRITE ABOUT GROWING UP

eds. Robert Williams & Ted Gideonese (essay memoirs, Carroll & Graf)
paperback $16 (paperback August 2006) 336 pages

These stunning essays are about what it is like to be gay and young, to be different and be aware of that difference from an early age. Coming out is less important than coming of age and the realization that young gay people experience the world in ways unlike straight boys. Whether it is a fascination with soap opera, a sensitivity to their own difference, or an obsession with male anatomy, boys who would eventually identify as gay have an indefinable but unmistakable gay sensibility. Sometimes the result is funny, sometimes harrowing, and often it is deeply moving. Essays by lauded young writers like Alex Chee (Edinburgh), Aaron Hamburger (Faith for Beginners), K. M. Soehnlein (The World of Normal Boys), Trebor Healy (Through It Came Bright Colors), Tom Dolby (The Trouble Boy), David Bahr, and Austin Bunn, are collected along with those by brilliant, newcomers such as Michael McAllister, Jason Tougaw, Viet Dinh, and the popular blogger, Joe.My.God.

THE SELECTED ESSAYS OF GORE VIDAL

By Gore Vidal, edited by Jay Parini (Doubleday, 2008)
Paperback $17 (paperback June 2009) 480 pages

As fine as the 24 novels and many other writings and plays are, the essay is Vidal's true metier. This new collection of more than 100 essays is an entry point into this giant's work, offering some of his most famous and entertaining essays from the past 50 years (including "Pornography" and "French Letters"). Compiled and introduced by Parini, the pieces range across Vidal's far-flung areas of expertise, resting most frequently and contentiously on literature and presidential politics. His assessment of the Top Ten Bestsellers of 1973 is a savagely meticulous dissection of middlebrow American taste. Vidal's comfort in puncturing conventional wisdom with his wit and analysis is displayed most notably in his discussion of the battle over the Kennedy legacy in The Holy Family and the controversial Black Tuesday, which condemns the Bush administration for its imperial ambitions after 9/11.

ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT (Grove, 1997, 192 pages)
SEXING THE CHERRY (Grove, 1998, 192 pages)
WEIGHT: THE MYTH OF ATLAS AND HERACLES (Cannongate, 176 pages, 2006) (each about $12 in paperback)

by Jeanette Winterson

"Oranges are Not the Only Fruit" was winner of the Whitbread Prize for best first fiction It is a coming-out novel in which the narrator, Jeanette, cuts her teeth on the knowledge that she is one of God's elect, but as this budding evangelical comes of age, and comes to terms with her preference for her own sex, the peculiar balance of her God-fearing household crumbles.

In "Sexing the Cherry," bizarre images and bawdy laughter galvanize this splendid English farce about a prodigious giantess and her explorer son in 17th-century London. Jordan fetches the first pineapple to the court, while his mother, The Dog Woman, wreaks vengeance upon Puritans in a brothel. The plague; the flying princesses who defy laws of the courts and gravity; Jordan's travels to the floating city and the wonders of the New World--the tale nips easily in and out of history and fantasy. The two characters eventually merge into the polluted life of modern London.

With wit and verve, "Weight" brings the mythical figure of Atlas into the space age and sets him free at last. In her retelling of the story of a god tricked into holding the world on his shoulders and his brief reprieve, she sets difficult questions about the nature of choice and coercion, how we choose our own destiny and at the same time can liberate ourselves from our seeming fate.

ORLANDO: A BIOGRAPHY

by Virginia Woolf (many editions, recently reprinted 1973, in print)
paperback from $14 (originally published 1928) 352 pages

In 1928, way before everyone else was talking about gender-bending and way, way before the terrific movie with Tilda Swinton, Virginia Woolf wrote her comic masterpiece, a fantastic, fanciful love letter disguised as a biography, to Vita Sackville-West. Orlando enters the book as an Elizabethan nobleman and leaves the book three centuries and one change of gender later as a liberated woman of the 1920s. Along the way this most rambunctious of Woolf's characters engages in sword fights, trades barbs with 18th century wits, has a baby, and drives a car. This is a deliriously written, breathless-making book and a classic both of lesbian literature and the Western canon.

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Books for consideration after they're in paperback

BELMONDO STYLE

by Adam Berlin (novel, Publishing Triangle 2005 winner for fiction, St. Martin's Press)

Small-time criminal father and gay son lead a hardscrabble life in Manhattan.

THE NEW KID

by Eliot Schrefer (novel, Simon & Schuster)

A trashy/sexy story about a young man who has spent his youth acclimating to being the "new kid" in school, and the jock he falls for at his new Florida school.

THE LITTLE STRANGER

by Sarah Waters (Booker Award short list 2009)

Dishonorable Passions: Sodomy Laws in America, 1861-2003"

by Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award: William N. Eskridge, Jr., " (Viking) Stonewall 2009 award winner, Lambda Literary Award nominee

Sex Variant Woman: The Life of Jeannette Howard Foster

by Joanne Ellen Passet (Da Capo Press) Stonewall 2009 award winner

The Boomerang Kid

by Jay Quinn, Alyson (Lambda Literary Award nominee 2008 )

Suggestions:

Body Surfing

by Dale Peck (paperback in 2010)

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Books we've decided not to read, but if someone really wants to discuss the matter again...:

IN COLD BLOOD by Truman Capote

MY ANTONIA by Willa Cather

THE NAKED CIVIL SERVANT by Quentin Crisp

CONCERNING THE ECCENTRICITIES OF CARDINAL PIRELLI by Ronald Firbank

SARAH by J. T. Leroy

Patrick White (a gay author, the only Australian to win the Nobel prize for literature, but no gay content)