FOR SOME TIME NOW, familiarity with the works of Klaus Mann (1906-1949) in the English-speaking world has been limited to a small but devoted cadre of readers. Understandably, Klaus Mann, a noteworthy literary figure on both sides of the Atlantic from the 1920’s to the 1940’s, will forever be obscured by his much more famous father, Thomas Mann. Nevertheless, …
MoreDANCE HALL ROAD opens with a teenager, Jimmy Drake, handing Adrian Drury a picture of an electric chair. What young Adrian has done isn’t clear, but one girl is dead and another is injured.
MoreAIDEN SHAW’S 1996 novel Brutal was, with apologies to Thomas Hobbes, a nasty, brutish, and short book about Paul, an HIV-positive male prostitute. It was a memorable effort by a writer who made his name in gay porn.
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FOR TEN YEARS, Bob Morris’ mother, Ethel, suffered from a blood disease that made her weak and frail. She was a beauty in her day, and she loved to sing and dance, but the disease slowly stole these pleasures away. Although Morris missed her, he admits in Assisted Loving that her death was a bit of a relief, partly because he thought he wouldn’t have to play the role of caretaker anymore. …
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THIS IS a timely book, with three reasons for existing. Images of Ancient Pederasty offers: first, the series of intelligent and resourceful essays by Lear and Cantarella on various aspects of the representation of pederasty in Athenian vase-painting; second, more than 110 illustrations of the most significant examples of the different typologies; and third, an appendix based on research undertaken by the late Keith DeVries …
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Review of The Ground Under My Feet
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About My Life and the Kept Woman is divided into two parts. The first, which runs from his sister’s wedding in 1945 through Rechy’s discharge from the Army in the late 1950’s, contains the most personal writing he has ever published. … The second half of the book is quite different.
MoreTHIS BOOK is a curiosity, that’s for sure. Sprightly, witty, distinctly unlabored, at times willfully unacademic, Reading Boyishly plots its course as: “Ancient boys, aged children, adolescent gentlemen: I dish them up as boyish cuisine… My book is puerile, a depreciative term meaning merely boyish.”
MoreBorn a red diaper baby (the child of Communists) on a chicken farm in New Jersey, Ian began playing the piano at three, wrote her first song at twelve, and was performing at hootenannies in New York’s Greenwich Village one year later. At fourteen, this wunderkind walked into pop producer Shadow Morton’s office, and the very next week she recorded her controversial folk ballad about interracial dating, “Society’s Child.”
MoreTHE MEMOIR has become such a crowded genre these days that one has the right to ask if each addition to its growing shelf warrants the lost trees. Jennifer Finney Boylan’s book, I’m happy to report, passes this test.
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