TOM CARDAMONE invited 27 other gay authors to submit pieces about their “favorite out-of-print gay books or forgotten titles.” At the same time, he says in his introduction to the resulting anthology, he was looking for works of fiction that had been excluded from the “gay canon”: works that “embodied a diversity and history that was either pre-Stonewall or went far beyond the available urban story,” including “campy pulp paperbacks.” It was an admirable goal. I assume he is both exhilarated and somewhat disappointed by the outcome.

A review of The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America by Don Lattin.

A review of A Hundred or More Hidden Things: The Life and Films of Vincente Minnelli by Mark Griffin.

THIS WELL-RESEARCHED historical novel alternates between Dublin in the early 1950’s and late 1990’s, following a gay man as he recalls his youthful adventures and the tragic series of events that forced him to flee for America. Daniel Ryan enters Dublin from his country home, captivated by the excitement and opportunities available in Ireland’s capital.

SUSAN SELLERS’ novel is an imaginative glimpse into the Bloomsbury circle of artists and intellectuals, and the two sisters—painter Vanessa Bell and writer Virginia Woolf—who were at the heart of it. In a series of vignettes, many of them lovely prose poems, Vanessa, the narrator of the novel, addresses Virginia, who is already dead, having killed herself in 1941.