In Sir John Gielgud: A Life in Letters, theatre historian Richard Mangan has compiled reams of Gielgud’s extant letters from 1912 to 1999, which offer a one-sided conversation with everyone from Martin Hensler, Gielgud’s longtime lover, to Judith Anderson and Noël Coward.

Clay’s Way by Blair Mastbaum Alyson Books. 242 pages, $12.95 BLAIR MASTBAUM’S impressive comic debut novel, set in Hawaii, presents the serious love choices of its fifteen-turning-sixteen-year-old narrator…More

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.