IN THE REALM of 20th-century American literature, the collected correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell is among the most important sets of letters that we have between two poets.

JOHN CROMER, the hero of Pilcrow, Adam Mars-Jones’ new novel, is the son of a British Air Commander father and a snobby mother who’s insecure about her class standing.

MOROCCAN EXPATRIATE Abdellah Taïa has spent the last eight years in France, writing, acting in films, and living the dream of being an intellectual in Paris. The jacket copy for Salvation Army broadcasts that Taïa is, or is reckoned by some to be, “the only gay man” writing about a country in which homosexuality is still a crime.

THE ESSAYS collected by Philip Kolin in this volume expand upon historian David Bergman’s observations concerning “the genealogy of transformation that occurs as successive generations of gay writers work through each others’ material, transfiguring a homophobic trope into a somewhat celebratory one.”

GAY MALE FICTION Since Stonewall is that rare creature, a new study of contemporary gay writing-in this case, of the male fictional tradition. If anything can be said to characterize the trajectory of this particular form, it is change-indeed, the speed of change. This is particularly evident in the 1960’s, which saw further examples of the gay-character-comes-to-a-bad-end variety-familiar

MAINLY KNOWN as one of the royals of the San Franciscan avant-garde poetry scene, Aaron Shurin has produced a collection of 21 short prose pieces, King of Shadows, which offers up some of the joys of reading a poet’s prose.