THE HOUR BETWEEN turned into several hours of guilty pleasure. Sebastian Stuart’s coming-of-age story, set in a private, residential high school, brings together Arthur and Katrina, the Will and Grace of secondary education. (He’s gay and she’s flighty.) Their maturing process is set against the battle of administrators at the school.
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On balance, the biggest difference between the two books is their readability. Hart’s memoir is lighter and easier going, a book that you want to read to the end. Agabian’s book, while well-written and insightful, could have ended forty pages before it did. Both are worthwhile contributions to the growing body of personal memoirs from everyday people with an exceptional past.
MoreAS IF peering through a kaleidoscope of twisted history and distorted time, I could not help but become drawn in by the characters and images that J. J. Sagmiller has created in this delightful romp through the raucous world of early 18th-century London theatre.
MoreTHIRTY-SOMETHING S. Bear Bergman has already lived several lives and is leaving a trail of documents for us fortunate readers to decipher. A performance artist, memoirist, educator, and more, Bergman’s elegantly written collection of essays chronicles life as a gender non-conformist-on the “transmasculine spectrum”-with a laugh-out-loud sense of humor.
MoreMARGOT CANADAY’S The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America argues that the last century’s evolving perception of sexuality changed the concept of American citizenship. She pursues her thesis with a rigorous review of the archives to illuminate how federal policies were increasingly inflected with an awareness of non-normative sexualities.
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In The Sealed Letter, Donoghue takes on the real lives behind a scandalous English divorce case of the 1860’s, a time when divorce was rare and shocking when it occurred.
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Reviews of the books Something to Declare : Good Lesbian Travel Writing, Interruptions: A Novel, The Resurrection of the Body: Pier Paolo Pasolini from Saint Paul to Sade, Sordid Truths: Selling My Innocence for a Taste of Stardom, and the film The Country Teacher.
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Book review
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Included [here] are numerous portraits of Diaghilev; photographs of friends, family, artists, nobility, and philanthropists; contemporary caricatures; drawings of Leon Bakst’s costumes (including his design for Nijinsky in the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, the ballet that scandalized audiences); photos of Igor Stravinsky (who composed the music for The Firebird and Le Sacre du Printemps) and other famous dancers, both male and female.
MoreWHAT HAPPENS when a seventeen-year-old gay boy from Missouri, high on Proust, arrives at Harvard, in 1941, on a quest for love, sex, and greatness? One man’s answer is revealed in rich, exasperating, and touching detail in The Journal of Claude Fredericks.
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