GAY POET Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933) has been called the greatest Greek poet of the 20th century, a serious statement about a nation that produced Yiannis Ritsos and Nobel laureates Odysseus Elytis and George Seferis. Cavafy did not actually visit Greece until his late thirties …

I FIRST LEARNED of Max Ewing while researching gay photographer George Platt Lynes. Ewing makes several appearances in the Lynes narrative, both as a young man who moved alongside Lynes in New York’s bohemian circles and as a fellow artist. Ewing used portrait photos to create his own pantheon of artists, movie stars, personalities, and handsome young men—actors, dancers, bodybuilders, and models who caught his eye.

Short reviews of The Paris Express, The Art Spy, Memoir of a Reluctant Giant, Julian’s Debut, The Portable Feminist Reader, and Love in the Lav

THERE REALLY IS no point in trying to separate Christopher Isherwood’s writing from the details of his life. His prolific use of those details has led critics to classify his works as examples of “autofiction.”

JAMES BALDWIN The Life Album by Magdalena J. Zaborowska Yale Univ. Press. 320 pages, $28.   IN HER NEW BIOGRAPHY of James Baldwin, Magdalena J. Zaborowska is hopelessly in love with her subject, but this doesn’t distract her from probing deep into the messy complexities and vulnerabilities that shadowed Baldwin throughout his life. She admitsMore

THE IMAGE beckoned: a closely shaved head in profile, double hoop earrings, handwritten neck tattoo above a crisp Oxford collar, typography following the curve of the cranium: Love Me Tender. It was French writer Constance Debré featured on the cover of her first novel translated into English. While the graphics grabbed me, it was the author’s singular voice and the radical simplicity of her enterprise that kept me reading—and made me want more. Now Debré’s trilogy—Playboy, Love Me Tender, and Name—is available in English translations.