BY THE TIME you’ve read the fifth novel by any writer, you begin to see his work in a way you could not with the first, which is where we stand now with Alan Hollinghurst, whose new book people have been waiting for since his last, The Line of Beauty, won the Man Booker Prize in 2004. (The Stranger’s Child has also been nominated for the Booker.) Although Hollinghurst said, after winning the Booker, that his next book would be a collection of short stories, what The Stranger’s Child does, in nearly five hundred pages, is to confirm that he is a writer who revels in the long form.

THIS FASCINATING COLLECtion of essays explores the queer elements within all of Shakespeare’s works. With contributions from scholars of both queer studies and Shakespeare, the volume represents a joining of the two fields rarely attempted before.

SIR EDMUND BACKHOUSE (1873-1944) has long been considered one of the prime homosexual self-fantasists of the last century-as delusional and self-created as “Baron Corvo,” the pederastic social climber who appointed his fictionalized self as Pope in the novel Hadrian the Seventh (1904) and inspired A. J. A. Symons’s classic sleuth biography The Quest for Corvo (1934).

A TWENTY-YEAR retrospective of Donald Moffett’s work titled The Extravagant Vein has been mounted by the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, where it will remain on view until January 8, 2012. After that, the exhibit will travel to the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery of Skidmore College in Sara-toga Springs, New York, and then (next June) to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Accompanying the exhibit is a handsome, full-color catalog, published by the Houston museum and Skira/Rizzoli, which includes essays by Bill Arning and Russell Ferguson, an interview with Douglas Crimp, and an overview by exhibit curator Valerie Cassel Oliver.

FEW AUTHORS have been more intent on making a reputation for themselves than Gertrude Stein. The fact that her name is known today by many people who have never read a word she wrote testifies to the success-but also somewhat to the failure-of her endeavor. As depicted most recently by Kathy Bates in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, which examined the continuing American fascination with an image of Paris in the 1920’s that Stein did a great deal to create, Stein is better known for the artistic careers she fostered than for her own creative output.

FOR THOSE who are skeptical of a gay rights movement that aspires only to enable GLBT individuals to join the cultural mainstream, this book will seem as refreshing as water in a desert. Judith Halberstam looks at a variety of media to find ‘queer’ subtexts that undermine a mainstream conception of personal success as based on heterosexual marriage, childbearing, and the accumulation of property.