FOLLOWING two memoirs and a first-rate debut novel, Selfish and Perverse (2007), comedian Bob Smith’s second novel, Remembrance of Things I Forgot, will surely thrill the author’s many fans. Here it may well prove resistant to a brief summary; and few works of fiction require a greater suspension of disbelief.
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Nunez has written a compellingly readable and even-handed, but all too brief, memoir of her time in the aura of the incandescent—and high-maintenance—Ms. Sontag.
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It Gets Better belongs on the shelves of every middle school library in this country; Homophobic Bullying should be in the principal’s office.
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IN A SAVING REMNANT, historian Martin Duberman offers a fascinating dual biography of two left-wing activists and writers, Barbara Deming and David McReynolds.
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THE TITLE of this haunting first novel by Amber Dawn literally means “beneath the rose,” usually applied to a secret meeting. In this case, Sub Rosa is an actual neighborhood that exists in its own dimension in a city that resembles Vancouver, Canada.
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THIS CHARMING NOVEL follows a diverse group of Americans on their summer travels in Naples. The cast comes from all walks of life, including a tour group of older gay men “and their admirers” …
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When I first heard that Tóibín had written a novel about Henry James, I wondered why. We already had five volumes of the Leon Edel biography. What could fiction add to fact? The answer was a portrait of loneliness. This was an audacious thing to do; there was a certain chutzpah about The Master. Now comes All a Novelist Needs, a collection of book reviews and essays by Tóibín that reflects his deep immersion in the considerable literature by and about James.
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SOME 700 PAGES into this comprehensive and even-handed biography of Michael Jackson, author J. Randy Taraborrelli remarks that the King of Pop would have paid a million dollars for a good night’s sleep. In the wake of his first child molestation scandal in 1994, Jackson worried that his image had been irrevocably tarnished, and there began a fatal descent into insomnia and substance abuse.
Given the details of his sudden death at fifty-he stopped breathing on June 25, 2009, due to an overdose of propofol, an anesthetic so powerful it’s known as “Milk of Amnesia” among surgeons-Jackson’s desperate search for the big sleep takes on an eerily gothic resonance.
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THREE YEARS AGO, with his novel Michael Tolliver Lives, Armistead Maupin returned to his much-admired “Tales of the City” series after a nearly twenty-year hiatus. It was a welcome homecoming for Maupin’s many fans …
In the latest novel in the series, Mary Ann in Autumn, Maupin picks up the story of Mary Ann Singleton.
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THE HISTORY of gay male literature in South Africa is select, and almost entirely white. To this reviewer, the grace and insight of its finest exemplar, Mark Behr’s novel Embrace, is now equaled by The Jack Bank.
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