While the historical information in The Paris Bookseller sometimes feels reminiscent of a history book, the novel’s easy style and tender portrayal of Beach and her friends make for a pleasurable reading experience.

            A new monograph, David Hockney—Moving Focus, memorializes not only the illustrious career of one of the world’s most famous artists but also the Tate Museum’s supporting role in it.

“ONCE WE BEGIN to look for them, we see sissies everywhere,” writes Marlon B. Ross in Sissy Insurgencies, noting that this controversial label can apply not only to such obviously gender non-conforming men as author James Baldwin and singers Little Richard and Sylvester James, but also to figures like educator Booker T. Washington, historian Henry Louis Gates, and basketball star Wilt Chamberlain.

Brief reviews of A PROXIMATE REMOVE: Queering Intimacy and Loss in The Tale of Genji, ALL OF YOU EVERY SINGLE ONE: A Novel, I’M NOT HUNGRY, BUT I COULD EAT: Stories, and WHAT WE PICK UP: Stories

WHAT any reasonable reader wants when picking up a celebrity memoir is a compendium of splashy anecdotes about other celebrities. Oh look! There’s Whoopi! Baryshnikov! Arbus! Channing! Manilow!—“American cultural royalty,” as Alan Cumming calls them. With this as the gold standard, the song-and-dance man with a new memoir titled Baggage: Tales from a Fully Packed Life does not disappoint.

            In its resetting of Dickens, Furnace Creek reads like an entertaining amalgam of the Victorian tradition and Southern Gothic. Newt’s first-person narration is littered with Britishisms (“hob,” “two weeks’ time”) and often carries the highfalutin syntax of social aspiration, but the legacy of the South is never far away …