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.

MY DOG TULIP

by J. R. Ackerley (1956 British memoir)
paperback $14 (paperback 2010, plus other editions) 208 pages

In 1947, J.R. Ackerley rescued an 18-month-old German shepherd, and from the start her every look and move were to undo him. "Tulip never let me down. She is nothing if not consistent. She knows where to draw the line, and it is always in the same place, a circle around us both. Indeed, she is a good girl, but--and this is the point--she would not care for it to be generally known." As he anatomizes her from head to toe with the awe-struck precision of a medieval courtier, Ackerley instantly turns us into Tulipomanes. "You're the trouble," Tulip's one good vet tells Ackerley as she banishes him from the surgery. "She's in love with you, that's obvious. And so life's full of worries for her." In many ways this 1956 memoir is an intimate saga of human idealism and doggish realism. This odd couple undertakes a series of adventures, which bring them into contact with a gallery of strange, British, mostly martial players. Made into an animated movie in 2010 with Christopher Plummer as the voice of Ackerley.

PERFECT PEACE

by Daniel Black (2010 novel from St Martins)
paperback $15 (St Martins paperback 2011) 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, paperback: Mariner books)
paperback $15 (paperback April 2010) 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.

A FAST LIFE: THE COLLECTED POEMS OF TIM DLUGOS

by Tim Dlugos, edited by David Trinidad (poetry, Nightboat Books 2011)
paperback $22 (paperback only 2011) 532 pages!

A Fast Life establishes Tim Dlugos--the witty and innovative poet at the heart of the New York literary scene in the late 1970s and 1980s and seminal poet of the AIDS epidemic--as one of the most distinctive and energetic poets of our time. This definitive volume contains all of the poems Dlugos published in his lifetime, a wealth of previously unpublished poems, and an informative introduction, chronology, and notes assembled by the volume's editor, poet David Trinidad.

Publishers Weekly: There's more to Dlugos than his posthumous legend suggests—and yet the legend is reason enough to revisit his work. No story of gay American poetry would be complete without an account of his urbane, openhearted, and various works, admired before and after the poet's death from AIDS in 1990. He's sometimes remembered as a hip New Yorker, a link between uptown and downtown scenes, whose poems amble unguardedly, first winningly, and then hauntingly, through the days and nights of his life: "it was more fun," one late poem muses, "before I knew/ my poetry could never be a spaceship/ to speed me far away." This ambitious collection, with Trinidad's foreword and chronology, might elevate from cult status a poet who did much more than respond to his times.

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.

SONGS FOR THE NEW DEPRESSION

by Kergan Edwards-Stout (2011 novel, Circumspect)
paperback $16 (paperback only, 2011) 270 pages

Gabriel Travers knows he's dying; he just can't prove it. Despite his doctor's proclamations to the contrary and rumors of a promising new HIV drug cocktail, all it takes is one glance into the mirror to tell Gabe everything he needs to know. His ass, once the talk of West Hollywood, now looks suspiciously like a Shar-Pei, prompting even more talk around town. Back in his 20's, life had been so easy. Caught up in the 1980's world of LOVE! MONEY! SEX!, Gabe thought he'd have it all. But every effort to better himself ended in self-sabotage, and every attempt at love left him with only a fake number, scrawled on a realtor's notepad. The only happiness he could remember was in high school, where he'd met Keith, his first love. Only Keith had recognized the goodness within, and knew of the brutal attack Gabe had faced, the effects of which still rule his life today. Now almost 40, and with the clock ticking, Gabe begins to finally peel back the layers and tackle his demons - with a little help from the music of the Divine Miss M and his mom's new wife, a country music-loving priest.

"Kergan Edwards-Stout has crafted a work of fiction reminiscent of some classic tales in Songs for the New Depression. Even better, Edwards-Stout's debut boasts the kind of dark humor that made Augusten Burroughs a household name." - Advocate.com

"Kergan Edwards-Stout infuses reality and hopefulness into a bittersweet story about compassion and personal growth. A distinctively entertaining novel written with moxie and bolstered by pitch-perfect perspectives." Kirkus Discoveries

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.

MAURICE

by E. M. Forster (Written 1913, posthumously published 1971)
paperback $14 (current Norton paperback in 1987) 256 pages

Maurice deals with the then unmentionable subject of homosexuality. Set in the elegant Edwardian world of Cambridge undergraduate life, this story introduces us to Maurice Hall when he is fourteen. We follow him through public school and Cambridge, and on into his father's firm, Hill and Hall, Stock Brokers. In a highly structured society, Maurice is a conventional young man in almost every way, "stepping into the niche that England had prepared for him," except that his is homosexual. More unusual, it concerns a relationship that ends happily.

THE METROPOLIS CASE

by Matthew Gallaway (2011 novel from Crown)
paperback $15 (Crown paperback Nov 2011) 384 pages

In his ambitious debut, Gallaway jumps backward and forward in time between two cities, spiraling in on four characters connected by music: Lucien, an opera singer coming-of-age in mid-19th-century Paris; Anna, an opera singer reaching the height of her career in 1960s New York; Maria, an extraordinarily promising young singer but a difficult student; and Martin, an aging lawyer whose love of music might save his life. Gallaway, a former musician, gives music a literary presence, intertwining opera and punk by illuminating their shared passion and chaos. The prose is sometimes purple, but the story remains grounded by characters grappling with love, in some cases for eternity.

“It’s to the credit of Matthew Gallaway’s enchanting, often funny first novel that it doesn’t require a corresponding degree of obsession from readers, but may leave them similarly transported: the book is so well written — there’s hardly a lazy sentence here — and filled with such memorable lead and supporting players that it quickly absorbs you into its worlds.”—The New York Times

“Matthew Gallaway’s The Metropolis Case is an ambitious, heady, intelligent and engaging first novel about the healing powers of art…it solidifies into a page turner, and better still, delivers on a wide range of concerns that go far beyond the musical interests that center the book’s narrative.”—Lambda Literary Review

THE MAIDS, THE BLACKS, THE BALCONY, and THE SCREENS (FOUR PLAYS)

by Jean Genet (plays published separately in several editions)
each paperback from $15 to $20 (various editions) 30-50 pages each

Genet based 'The Maids' on an actual event, one he felt a certain kin-ship with. In 1933 french police found Madame Lancelin and her daughter face down, in their living room, utterly mutilated. The eyes had disappeared, all teeth had been knocked out, fragments of bone and flesh were strewn about the floor, walls covered in blood. Upstairs the two servant-maids, the Papin sisters, were found naked, huddled together in one of two single beds. Immediately they confessed. Immediately, also, the papers picked up the story. The public was facinated how these two soft-spoken, mild-mannered girls, without provocation could have acted with such wild brutality. Senseless, irrational violence - Genet's speciality. He uses this story as a means to attack conformity. A massive revolt against obedience, servitude, and the upperclass. A bloody triumph of individuality .

"The Blacks" is an abstract work, a play within a play so there are lots of times when you are not sure when the characters are addressing themselves or the audience. That being said Genet originally wrote the play as an assault against French Colonialism in Africa in the 1950's. However "The Blacks" most famous production came in New York in 1961. Directed by Gene Frankel and starring Roscoe Lee Browne, James Earl Jones, Lou Gossett Jr., Cicely Tyson, and Maya Angelou "The Blacks" ushered in a whole new era of black actors in America.

The Balcony (1957) has come to be recognised as one of the founding plays of modern theatre. In a brothel, the madam, Irma, directs a series of fantastical scenarios - a bishop forgives a penitent, a judge punishes a thief, a general rides astride his horse. Outside, an uprising threatens to engulf the streets. The patrons of the brothel wait anxiously for the chief of police to arrive, but in his place comes the queen's envoy to inform that the figureheads of the establishment have been killed in the uprising. Play-acting turns to reality, as the patrons don their costumes in public in the attempt to quell the insurrection. Illusion and reality, order and dissolution - these are the grand themes of The Balcony, all refracted through the prism of Genet's sexualised genius.

The Screens is the last of Genet's plays to be performed during his lifetime. Its subject is the Algerian War of Independence, and it is an intricately crafted, grandiose construction - beguiling and baffling in equal measure. While the most openly political of Genet's plays, the work is not revolutionary in intent. Rather, as the play progresses the radical direction of lighting and the use of folding canvases serve to segment and compartmentalise the drama, and in so doing they transform the extremities of war into a series of incantatory scenes, vital and ritualistic, that bring stability to an otherwise unbearable reality. Haunting, savage and grotesque, The Screens is none the less an emotionally invigorating work that demonstrates redemption through abjection.

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 ART OF FIELDING

by Chad Harbach (2011 novel, Little, Brown & Co.)
to be considered when in paperback

At a small college on the Wisconsin side of Lake Michigan, the baseball team sees its fortunes rise and then rise some more with the arrival of a supremely gifted shortstop. Harbach's expansive, allusive first novel combines the pleasure of an old-fashioned baseball story with a stately, self-reflective meditation on talent and the limits of ambition, played out on a filed where evey hesitation is amplified and every error judged by an exacting, bloodthuirsty audience. The novel includes a major gay character (the star baseball player's gay roommate) in a very natural role. One of the NY Times five best fiction books of 2011.

MYSTERIOUS SKIN

by Scott Heim (1996 novel - Harper Perennial)
paperback $15 (republished 2005) 304 pages

"The summer I was eight years old, five hours disappeared from my life" So runs the catchy opening to Heim's impressive first novel. The speaker is Brian Lackey, now a troubled teenager, once an introverted kid growing up scared in the small town of Hutchinson, Kans. The reason for his memory lapse and his fear, as we and Brian learn during the course of the novel, turns out not to be the space aliens that he first suspects, but his molestation at the hands of his Little League coach. The key to Brian's reclamation of those lost hours is homosexual hustler Neil McCormick - the slugger on that Little League team and an accomplice to Brian's sexual abuse. Working its way over the course of a decade toward Brian and Neil's reunion, the narrative unfolds through chapters whose points of view alternate among Brian, Neil and a handful of their siblings and confidants. While perhaps introducing prominent characters who outlive their usefulness, Heim aksi creates scenes of genuine beauty and handles his complicated characters and delicate subject matter with calm assurance.

WE DISAPPEAR

by Scott Heim (2008 novel, Harper Perennial)
paperback $14 (paperback Feb 2009) 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.

THE STRANGER'S CHILD by Alan Hollinghurst (2011) - when in paper

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.

MARY ANN IN AUTUMN (and/or the previous
MICHAEL TOLLIVER LIVES)

by Armistead Maupin (A Tales of the City novel, Harper)
paperback, 304 pages

It's been 20 years since series anchor Mary Ann Singleton left her family and headed to New York, but the San Fran gang is (mostly) all here, older, wiser, and settled in: Michael "Mouse" Tolliver is married to Ben; Shawna, Mary Ann's estranged daughter, is a popular sex blogger; and grand dame Anna Madrigal, former landlady to all, is still kicking. Mary Ann ditched the young Shawna for a career in television. Now, nearing 60, she's back with news she can't bear to tell anyone but Michael. From the haven of his tiny garden cottage, Mary Ann regroups and confronts some uncomfortable chapters in her past.

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.

QUARANTINE

by Rahul Mehta (2011 short stories, Harper)
paperback $15 (paperback 2011) 224 pages

The characters in Quarantine, openly gay Indian-American men, are Westernized in some ways, with cosmopolitan views on friendship and sex, while struggling to maintain relationships with their families and cultural traditions. Grappling with the issues of social acceptance, the right to pursue happiness, and the heavy toll of listening to their hearts and bodies, they confront an elder generation's attachment to old ways. Estranged from their cultural in-group and set apart from larger society, the young men in these lyrical, provocative, emotionally wrenching, yet frequently funny stories find themselves quarantined. Already a runaway success in India, Quarantine marks the debut of a unique literary talent.

FAITH & FIDELITY

by Tere Michaels (2009 Loose ID "bodice-ripper")
paperback $13 (paperback Jan 2009) 329 pages

New York City Vice Detective Evan Cerelli has lost his wife, the only person he ever loved and slept with. He's trying to get on with his life, build a life for his children. Former Homicide Detective Matt Haight is a ladies' man, all sex/no commitment. He's depressed, having a midlife crisis, and not sure where his life is headed. The two find friendship in the bottom of a shared bottle. When the friendship turns to love, it shakes two straight men to the core and flips their lives inside out. Kids, families, careers that are not gay-friendly -- can all the love in the world overcome the obstacles to faith and fidelity?

Publisher's Note: This book contains explicit sexual content, graphic language, and situations that some readers may find objectionable.

Library Journal: Devasted by the death of his wife and childhood sweetheart NYC detective Evan Cerelli finds a drinking buddy in former cop Matt Haight. As the two men drrown their sorrows, they grow closer and soon find themselves making time for each other outside of the bar. Neither man knows how to negotiate this new relationship or how to handle the implications for their careers and Evan's children. This romance features two protagonists in midlife; each has regrets and sorrows that they must resolve if they want to acept this chance at love. Emotionally more resonant and complex than some offerings, this novel also has good supporting characters who help root this story in reality.

A GREAT UNRECORDED HISTORY: A NEW LIFE OF E. M. FORSTER

by Wendy Moffat (2010 biography, Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
paperback $20 (paperback April 2011) 404 pages

E. M. Forster (1879–1970), author of such classic novels as Howards End (1910) and Passage to India (1924), was gay. His sexual orientation has been noted since the 1970 publication of his posthumous novel, Maurice, which was about love and sex between men. But Moffat places Forster’s homosexuality at the core of his being, both as the lodestar by which he lived his life and as a source of intense frustration because of social prohibition against depicting it in fiction. He realized early on his attraction to his own gender, and we are given, with no hint of salaciousness, an honest account of his sex life over the years. Forster may have been regarded as mousy, but this treatment of his life is undeniably robust. In fact, it shines with the beauty its subject was made sad that he did not possess.

THE ORTON DIARIES

(Da Capo Press, 310 pages, 1996 paperback $18)

PRICK UP YOUR EARS: THE BIOGRAPHY OF JOE ORTON

by John Lahr (Univ of California, 320 pages, 1996 paperback)

Joe Orton emerged in the 1960s as the most talented comic playwright in recent English history and was considered the direct successor to Wilde, Shaw, and Coward. He was brutally murdered by his lover at the peak of his career. His most popular plays include "Entertaining Mr. Sloan," "Loot," and "What the Butler Saw."

The Orton Diaries, written during Orton's last eight months, chronicle in his remarkably candid style an outrageously unfettered life: his literary success and awards, overtures from the Beatles, his sexual escapades (at his mother's funeral, with a dwarf in Brighton, and in Tangiers), as well as the breakdown of his sixteen-year relationship to Halliwell, the relationship that transformed and destroyed him.

Prick Up Your Ears is a watershed biography; it paved the way for Orton's revival and ensured his place in the English repertoire. Lahr chronicles Orton's working-class childhood and stagestruck adolescence, the scandals and disasters of his early professional years, and the brief, glittering success of his blistering comedies.

THE CHARIOTEER

by Mary Renault (1959 novel, republished in 2003 by Vintage)
paperback $15 (multiple editions) 352 pages

After enduring an injury at Dunkirk during World War II, Laurie Odell is sent to a rural veterans’ hospital in England to convalesce. There he befriends the young, bright Andrew, a conscientious objector serving as an orderly. As they find solace and companionship together in the idyllic surroundings of the hospital, their friendship blooms into a discreet, chaste romance. Then one day, Ralph Lanyon, a mentor from Laurie’s schoolboy days, suddenly reappears in Laurie’s life, and draws him into a tight-knit social circle of world-weary gay men. Laurie is forced to choose between the sweet ideals of innocence and the distinct pleasures of experience.

Originally published in the United States in 1959, "The Charioteer" is a bold, unapologetic portrayal of male homosexuality during World War II that stands with Gore Vidal’s "The City and the Pillar" and Christopher Isherwood’s "Berlin Stories" as a monumental work in gay literature.

THE BOOMERANG KID by Jay Quinn (Alyson) - when in paperback

A DENSITY OF SOULS

by Christopher Rice (novel, Miramax)
paperback $13 (2001) 320 pages

Take the sensuous New Orleans setting, add a generous helping of tangled Southern family history, and season liberally with a sensitive teenage boy rejected by his friends and frightened of his own homoerotic impulses for this first novel by Anne Rice's son. But the only family resemblance is in the setting, the sexual orientation of the lovingly described male characters, and the scent of overripe magnolias. There's murder, suicide, and madness at the heart of this sometimes clumsy coming-of-age story, which focuses on the youthful friendship of four young men. This friendship is destroyed by a sexual incident that takes place just before the students enter an exclusive prep school. There, Stephen is ostracized by his former friends, now the most popular kids on campus, who'd just as soon forget their own complicity in the event. Envy, passion, and rage drive the narrative.

GLENWAY WESCOTT PERSONALLY - A BIOGRAPHY

by Jerry Roscoe (biography, University of Wisconsin Press)
paperback $14 (paperback March 2010) 328 pages

Wescott (1901-87), born a Wisconsin farm boy but destined to live a cosmopolitan literary life, loved language so much he not only devoted himself to reading and writing but also to speaking well, and he's remembered as much for being a splendid conversationalist and lecturer as he is for his few indelible novels, masterful essays, and celebrated journals. Wescott is also cherished for his candor about his homosexuality in homophobic times. Rosco, who knew Wescott, answers the big question about his subject's infamous writer's block by explaining that Wescott never stopped writing; he just lost the feel for fiction and had a curious aversion to being published. "Happiness was his real distraction," Rosco writes, detailing Wescott's complex and sustained relationship with curator Monroe Wheeler, a string of complementary involvements, friendships with a veritable writers' who's who, and, in the book's most dramatic revelations, his close association with sex researcher Alfred Kinsey. Fluently anecdotal and analytical, Rosco's engrossing biography of this seminal man of letters neatly fills a gap in literary and gay history. And Jerry Rosco might be able to give us another rare Wescott story.

THE UNREAL LIFE OF SERGEY NABOKOV

by Paul Russell (2011 novel)
paperback $17 (2011 paperback only) 376 pages

In his novel based on the extraordinary life of the gay brother of Vladimir Nabokov, Paul Russell re-creates the rich and changing world in which Sergey, his family and friends lived; from wealth and position in pre-revolutionary Russia, to the halls of Cambridge University, and the Parisian salon of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. But it is the honesty and vulnerability of Sergey, our young gay narrator, that hook the reader: his stuttering childhood in the shadow of his brilliant brother, his opium-fueled evenings with his sometime lover Cocteau, his troubled love life on the margins of the Ballets Russes and its legendary cast, and his isolation in war torn Berlin where he will ultimately be arrested, sent to a camp and die in 1945. A meticulously researched novel, in which you will meet an extraordinary cast of characters including Picasso, Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Magnus Hirschfield ("Tante Magnesia"), Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Cocteau, and of course the master himself, Vladimir Nabokov, this is ultimately the story of a beautiful and vulnerable homosexual boy growing into an enlightened and courageous man. A story that will make you laugh and smile and then break your hear. This is a rich tapestry of the human condition.

ROBIN AND RUBY

by K.M. Soehnlein (2010 novel, Kensington)
paperback $15 (paperback 2011) 211 pages

Robin, the protagonist of Soehnlein’s well-received The World of Normal Boys (2000) is now 20 and has just broken up with his lover, Peter, when his younger sister, Ruby, goes missing. Robin immediately sets off for the Jersey shore in search of her, accompanied by his longtime best friend, George. The irony is that Robin is in search of himself, too, and of the truth about his deepening romantic feelings for George, who is African American and is on his own journey toward political activism. Meanwhile, Ruby has re-connected with a troubled, drug-abusing boy from her past. So much drama, all of it overlaid—it being the early 1980s—with the desperate fear of AIDS. The issue-laden story alternates between Robin and Ruby, whose actions sometimes seem stage-managed by the author in an attempt to heighten the drama (of course, Robin does aspire to be an actor). Nevertheless, readers will appreciate the nicely realized sense of time and place and—perhaps despite themselves—will also develop a sneaking fondness for the characters.

FINLATER

by Shawn Stewart Ruff (first novel, Quote Editions 2008)
paperback $15.50 (paperback July 2008) 292 pages

Meet Cliffy Douglas, the 13-year-old narrator of Finlater, a coming-of-age love story set in racially-charged 1970s Cincinnati. First day of school, the bright champion speller from the Findlater Gardens Projects is promoted over seventh grade. In eight-grade algebra class, he is seated beside Noah Baumgarten, and the "Nigger and Jew" are drawn to each other for multiple reasons. Children of their time, segregated by neighborhood, opportunity and skin color, neither boy has ever had a friend like the other. Cliffy is soon convinced that he wants to be Jewish, and Noah a black soul brother, to more fully fit into each other's lives. Deep complexities become apparent. As the two chum around the roiling city, their fantasies collide with reality, and both boys grapple for meaning and clarity beyond the very narrow ideas each has of the other's world.

In this acclaimed first novel---winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Debut Fiction 2008, and finalist for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction---the course of growing up in just-this-side-of-segregation 1970s Cincinnati, Ohio, seems predictable if uninspiring for Cliffy Douglas. That is, until the deadbeat father of this gifted 13-year-old black kid from the Findlater Gardens Projects appears out of nowhere. The real fun and trouble begin when Noah, a Jewish boy he meets in junior high school, takes him on a joyride to lust and first love.

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 GREAT MIRROR OF MALE LOVE

by Ihara Saikaku (40 short stories and notes, Stanford Univ Press)
paperback $30 (translated from Japanese 1991, originally published in 1687), 384 pages

Ihara Saikaku (1642 – 1693) was a Japanese poet and creator of the "floating world" genre of Japanese prose (ukiyo-zoshi). Not for the prurient, this is an entertaining and sometimes funny book relating the ins and outs of boy love in samurai japan. The descriptions of the boys are priceless as are the innovative ways they are chased by their admirers. Many of the translators notes are required to fully understand the context. “A welcome opportunity for wider comparison of the literary traditions and sexual conventions of Japanese and Euro-American cultures.”— Journal of Japanese Studies

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."

THE SELECTED POEMS OF MAY SARTON

by May Sarton (poetry, W. W. Norton & Company
paperback $19 (paperback 1997 - some editions available) 210 pages

Lucid, brilliant, astoundingly original, May Sarton is a rare treasure among modern poets. A master of technical form, she never veers from the idea that poetry is for the revelation of individual insights gleaned from often painful experiences. Her uniqueness among the moderns lies in her understanding of the importance of the discipline imposed by traditional form as an instrument of clarity. She is among the very best.

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.

THE LITTLE STRANGER

by Sarah Waters (novel, Riverhead Trade )
paperback $15 (paperback May 2010) 528 pages

Booker Award short list 2009. Waters reflects on the collapse of the British class system after WWII in a haunted house tale with horrifying ghosts. Doctor Faraday, a lonely bachelor, first visited Hundreds Hall, where his mother once worked as a parlor maid in 1919. When Faraday returns 30 years later to treat a servant, he becomes obsessed with Hundreds's elegant owner, Mrs. Ayres; her 24-year-old son, Roderick, an RAF airman wounded during the war; and her slightly older daughter, Caroline, now considerd a "spinster." Supernatural trouble kicks in after Caroline's mild-mannered dog attacks a visiting child. A damaging fire and a suicide follow. Faraday, a very unreliable narrator, carries the reader swiftly along to the devastating conclusion. The critic from the Telegraph hailed this as a genuinely creepy story “guaranteed to make anyone with a pulse gibber in fright.”

ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT

by Jeanette Winterson (memoir, Grove)
paperback $12 (Grove paperback 1997) 192 pages

"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.

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Books for consideration after they're in paperback

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.

SEX VARIANT WOMAN: THE LIFE OF JEANETTE HOWARD FOSTER

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

THE SECRET LIVES OF SOMERSET MAUGHAM

by Selina Hastings (biography, Random House)
--not yet in paperback, 626 pages

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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