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.

BLITHE SPIRIT, HAY FEVER, AND PRIVATE LIVES: THREE PLAYS

by Noel Coward (plays, Vintage)
paperback $15 (paperback 1999 - other multiple editions available) 256 pages

Noel Coward's talent for spinning gossamer plots into rapier-sharp comedy assures his reputation in theatre, and his comedies have such timeless appeal that they remain staples of both English and American theatre. "Blithe Spirit" concerns a novelist who invites a medium to give a seance so that he might learn tricks of the trade for the book he is writing--but the medium is no fake, and she unintentionally summons up the ghost of his first wife. "Private Lives" offers the story of a divorced couple who unexpectedly meet while honeymooning with their new spouses--whom they quickly abandon in order to resume their torrid passion for each other. "Hay Fever" presents the story of visitors to an eccentric family who are very nearly driven mad before they are able to escape. Coward was reknowned for his sophistocated and often acid turn of phrase, and all three of these plays contain enough outrageous situations and sharp-tongued lines to make even the worst sourpuss laugh loud enough to annoy the neighbors.

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.

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.

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.

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 SELECTED POEMS OF FREDRICO GARCIA LORCA

by Federico Garcia Lorca (Spanish poetry in translation, New Directions)
paperback $15 (paperback re-issued 2005 - other versions available) 186 pages

A bilingual reissue of a landmark poetry volume with a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize winner W. S. Merwin. This collection has introduced generations of American readers to mesmerizing poetry since 1955. Lorca (1898-1937) is admired all over the world for the lyricism, immediacy and clarity of his poetry, as well as for his ability to encompass techniques of the symbolist movement with deeper psychological shadings. But Lorca's poems are, most of all, admired for their beauty. Undercurrents of his major influences—Spanish folk traditions from his native Andalusia and Granada, gypsy ballads, and his friends the surrealists Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel—stream throughout Lorca's work. Poets represented here as translators are as diverse as Stephen Spender, Langston Hughes, Ben Belitt, William Jay Smith, and W.S. Merwin.

LAKE OVERTURN

by Vestal MacIntyre (novel, Harper Perennial)
paperback $11 (paperback June 2010) 448 pages

Lina and Connie are single mothers, neighbors in a Eula, Idaho, trailer park. Lina, the daughter of migrant Mexican farm workers, is trying to cope with her angry teenage son Jesús, newly returned after living with wealthy white foster parents. Connie struggles with her literal reading of Old Testament laws against remarriage, especially when a handsome missionary visits. The women's younger sons, Enrique and Gene, love science and are determined to win the statewide science fair. A real-life natural disaster inspires their project: 1,700 people died around Lake Nyos in Cameroon in 1986 and the two wonder whether the same thing could happen near their local Lake Overlook. This is the taking-off point for McIntyre as he links Enrique's coming-of-age and struggle with his sexuality to other Eulans, revealing broken families, lingering death, betrayal, loss, and friendships and romances, both requited and unrequited.

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.

THE SILVER HEARTED

by David McConnell (novel, Alyson)
paperback $15 (paperback March 2010) 230 pages

Edmund White says: “The Silver Hearted" is our "Heart of Darkness." It is just as ominous, as violent, as exotic, as darkly colonial. But it is a lot better written than Conrad's book. Whereas Conrad is always resorting to ‘the unspeakable,' McConnell tells us everything in glowing detail and in fresh, eloquent language. Sexy, demonic, elusive, "The Silver Hearted: is a perfect work of art."

Set against a background of revolution of an unnamed port town in the near future, the story's unnamed narrator is hired to protect a vast sum of money that shadowy investors have entrusted to him. This fortune must be protected at all costs, and so he turns for assistance to a beautiful young sailor who helps the narrator evacuate his money from a trading emporium overrun by violent mobs. With a hopeless fondness, the boy wants acknowledgement that lives have been destroyed for the sake of money. Unfortunately the ruthless calculus of profit and loss has an eerie appeal the narrator can't shake, as the mobs close in to the gritty port.

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).

THE LOST: A SEARCH FOR SIX OF SIX MILLION

by Daniel Mendelsohn (memoir, Harper Perennial)
paperback $16 (paperback 2007) 528 pages

As a boy in the 1960s, Mendelsohn could make elderly relatives cry just by entering the room, so much did he resemble his great-uncle Shmiel Jager, who had been "killed by the Nazis." This short phrase was all Mendelsohn knew of his grandfather's brother, who had remained with his wife and daughters in a Ukrainian shtetl after his grandfather left for America. Long obsessed with family history, Mendelsohn, embarked in 2001 on a series of journeys to learn exactly what had happened to Shmiel and his family. The result is a rich, ruminative "mythic narrative... about closeness and distance, intimacy and violence, love and death." Mendelsohn uses these words to describe the biblical story of Cain and Abel, for one of the book's most striking elements is the author's recounting of the book of Genesis in parallel with his own story, highlighting eternal themes of origins and family, temptation and exile, brotherly betrayal, creation and annihilation.

PORTRAIT OF A MARRIAGE: VITA SACKVILLE-WEST AND HAROLD NICOLSON

by Nigel Nicolson

Research this before considering it -

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.

THE BOOMERANG KID

by Jay Quinn (Alyson)

To be considered when it comes out in paperback

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.

ALL PASSION SPENT
or perhaps something else

by Vita Sackville-West

Research this before selecting a title for consideration

A RECKONING

By May Sarton (novel, W.W. Norton & Co.)
paperback $14 (paperback 1997, multiple editions available) 256 pages

When Laura Spelman learns that she will not get well, she looks on this last illness as a journey during which she must reckon up her life, give up the nonessential, and concentrate on what she calls "the real connections." The heart of the story is Laura's realization that for her the real connections have been with womenher brilliant and devastating mother, a difficult daughter, and especially a woman she knew when she was young. In interviews, the openly lesbian Sarton expressed anger at critics who derided the (autobiographical?) novel, which contains a memorable portrait of a gay male son, by marginalizing it as a "lesbian novel."

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.

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.

THE BLUE ORCHARD

by Jackson Taylor (novel, Touchstone)
paperback $15 (paperback Jan 2010) 416 pages

In what could be a modern classic, poet and fiction writer Taylor takes an unblinking look at abortion in America many decades before Roe v. Wade . Introducing Verna Crone as she's arrested in her home in 1954, Taylor then transports readers to her poor beginnings, yanked out of school to help support her family. Raped by her first employer, Verna undergoes an abortion, illegally administered by a country midwife. After another pregnancy leaves her with a son, Verna enlists her mom's help and returns to the city to become a nurse; before long, Verna begins working for Dr. Crampton, a well-to-do African-American doctor who performs illegal abortions. Conflicted at first, Verna grows accustomed to the money and finds herself less upset with every procedure; it's only after Crampton runs afoul of state politicos that the two are arrested. In this powerful, vivid debut novel, Taylor parses issues of race, power, and religion in unflinching terms while believably inhabiting the mind of a conflicted woman.

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.

RIMBAUD: THE DOUBLE LIFE OF A REBEL

by Edmund White (biography, Atlas)
paperback $11 (Dec 2009) 256 pages

In a lean biographical-critical book by one of our outstanding literary commentators, White shows how one of the heroes of French culture, Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891), led a double life. Rimbaud was a famous literary prodigy as a teenager (publishing "A Season in Hell" when he was 19) and then abruptly abandoning the literary life for more than 15 years until his death at 36. Unconventionally beautiful, from a provincial middle-class background and something of a mama's boy, the lover of Paul Verlaine was bisexual and secretly craved conventional worldly success. White portrays him as part shaman, part alcoholic and drug addict, and part Catholic saint. Included are White's superb translations of works he is discussing.

THREE PLAYS: OUR TOWN, THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH, AND THE MATCHMAKER

by Thornton Wilder (plays, Harper Perennial Modern Classics)
paperback $15 (paperback 2007 - other editions available) 450 pages

This important new omnibus edition features an illuminating foreword by playwright John Guare and an extensive afterword for each play drawing on unpublished letters and other unique documentary material prepared by Tappan Wilder. "Our Town" is Wilder's timeless 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning look at love, death, and destiny and is celebrated around the world and performed at least once each day in the United States. "The Skin of Our Teet" is Wilder's 1942 romp about human follies and human endurance starring the Antrobus family of Excelsior, New Jersey. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1943. "The Matchmaker" is his brilliant 1954 farce about money and love starring that irrepressible busybody Dolly Gallagher Levi. This play inspired the Broadway musical Hello, Dolly! .

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.

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Books for consideration after they're in paperback

PERFECT PEACE

by Daniel Black (novel, hardbound March 2010, St Martins, 325 pages)

The heartbreaking portrait of a large, rural southern family's attempt to grapple with their mother's desperate decision to make her newborn son into the daughter she will never have. When the seventh child of the Peace family turns eight, her mother tells her bewildered daughter, “You was born a boy. I made you a girl. But that ain't what you was supposed to be. So, from now on, you gon' be a boy. It'll be a little strange at first, but you'll get used to it, and this'll be over after while.” From this point forward, his life becomes a bizarre kaleidoscope of events. Meanwhile, the Peace family is forced to question everything they thought they knew about gender, sexuality, unconditional love, and fulfillment.

THE SKY BELOW

by Stacy D'Erasmo (novel, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, hardback Jan 2009) 288 pages

A luminous novel crafted in meticulous detail, D'Erasmo's third book tells the story of Gabriel Callahan's life, beginning with his father's abandonment and tracing his ambivalent search for wholeness into adulthood. An obituary writer for a half-assed tourist newspaper in post-9/11 Manhattan, Gabriel is also an artist, creating still lifes from found and stolen objects (clearly based on Cornell boxes). Gabriel's wealthy lover hopes that Gabriel will abandon his marginal life and move in with him, but Gabriel steadfastly refuses, even when a health crisis threatens. An impulsive trip to Mexico leads him to a hardscrabble commune where he finds clarity. The descriptions of Gabriel's artworks and his daily struggles comprise a dizzying trip through metaphor and expression. This is a demanding and immensely satisfying novel, filled with meticulous language, and certainly one of the better New York artist novels in recent memory.

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 JEANETTE HOWARD FOSTER

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

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

Science Fiction, in general - unless somebody has a great suggestion, it doesn't seem to be very popular

IN COLD BLOOD by Truman Capote

MY ANTONIA by Willa Cather

THE LETTERS OF NOEL COWARD

THE NAKED CIVIL SERVANT by Quentin Crisp

CONCERNING THE ECCENTRICITIES OF CARDINAL PIRELLI by Ronald Firbank

SARAH by J. T. Leroy

NOW IS THE HOUR by Tom Spanbauer

THE SELECTED ESSAYS OF GORE VIDAL

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

ORLANDO by Virginia Woolf