YIDDISH has entered the American language so extensively by now that most people have probably heard the word “shiksa”—especially if they’ve read Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. It’s the Yiddish word for a gentile woman. Robert Hofler’s new book on the making of the Barbra Streisand-Robert Redford movie The Way We Were (1973) is about its masculine equivalent, the much less euphonic “shegetz.”
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Henry James Framed is a beautifully produced book. The illustrations are first-rate, and the design allows for easy access to footnotes. Many readers skip footnotes, but Michael Anesko, a professor at Penn State, writes with such wit and clarity, it would be a mistake not to dig further into the delights he has served up in this book.
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YOU’VE NEVER heard of Alfred Chester? Well, you’re surely not alone. Chester died in 1971 at the age of 43 of a heart attack caused by drugs and drinking. His closest friend and staunchest supporter, Edward Field, considers it a suicide. All of Alfred Chester’s books are out of print, and he published only five in his lifetime.
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Schwabe probably carried his secrets to the grave when he was killed in 1915 by a German officer who, convinced that Schwabe was a traitor because he spoke perfect German, summarily executed him for treason. When Schwabe enlisted, he changed his German name to the more English-sounding Shaw, but he could not convince a German officer that he was English—an irony that Wilde the dramatist would have relished.
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Libretto is filled with dramatic complexity, but Wadsworth steers the story to resolution, clarifying subplots with brief recaps. Her dialogue comes across as direct and sophisticated, reflecting careful observation of how people talk, with curiosity and brisk ripostes. Like the narrator in Light, Coming Back, Ally comes to understand “old perceptions of love and loss” and to imagine new possibilities for her vagabond writing life.
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Guibert is clearly interested in the master-servant dynamic: What role does each perform? Who enslaves whom? What binds the two into a relationship? What, indeed, is the attraction, keen among some homosexuals, of a uniform? “I’ve always been fascinated, almost erotically so, by the outfits that minions of all sorts wear,” the master says. He has adopted an almost masochistic position vis-à-vis his manservant, who, in turn, indulges in ever more sadistic behavior toward his employer.
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Elias Jahshan’s mission in This Arab Is Queer is clear: he seeks to provide a platform for LGBT Arabs to speak for themselves. Asserting that Western coverage of queer Arab lives often focuses on sensationalist news stories that “rarely engage with Arab voices directly,” he has collected narratives from eighteen Arab writers from eleven countries and the diaspora to present a fuller, more accurate depiction of queer Arab life.
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AMERICAN POET Charles Henri Ford (1908–2002) and his “surrogate son” Indra Tamang share a chapter in Scott Herring’s intriguing, fact-filled, opinion-strewn book of bio-criticism, Aging Moderns: Art, Literature, and the Experiment of Later Life, which focuses on six 20th-century Modernist artists and writers.
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Selby Wynn Schwartz’s experimental novel is a philosophical portrait of woman as creator. The novel’s homocentric text digresses, entangles, and slides down a rabbit hole into the lives of queer women from the 18th through the 20th centuries. Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando, After Sappho forces the question of female creativity in literature and art: is it equal in originality to male creativity?
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In this memoir, Shakur searches for emotional and political meaning in a country that can no longer hide from its racist past. We follow his political and personal journeys from Ohio, back to Jamaica, to the Philippines, to France, and to the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota. His dramatic disappointment at the lies and compromises that ripple through the American Dream, particularly for immigrant families, is lamented in ways both poignant and painful.
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