… The action of Sundowner Ubuntu, the fifth in the Russell Quant series, is set in motion when Russell is hired by a middle-aged woman named Clara Ridge to locate her, son whose juvenile delinquency caused her husband to disown the boy when he was only sixteen. The recent death of her flint-hearted husband has freed her to search for Matthew, whom she hasn’t seen or heard from in twenty years. Russell’s search eventually takes him to a slum in South Africa and a game preserve in Botswana, where …

The Letters of Noël Coward Edited by Barry Day Knopf. 780 pages, $37.50 NOT MANY PEOPLE write real letters now, so those of us who like to read…More

Since Lawrence R. Schehr, the author and editor of this first English translation of The Third Sex, a book published under that penname in 1927, assures us that “one is safe to assume that Willy did not write the book,” …

WHILE THE PLOT of Pat MacEnulty’s latest novel does recount events chronologically over a six-month period from May to December, the title simply doesn’t do the book justice.

STAND-UP COMEDIANS, because their success usually relies on being able to think in short, epigrammatic bursts, rarely venture into the realm of more extended prose writing. In doing so, Bob Smith has followed the example of comics such as Stephen Fry and Steve Martin by writing a full-length-indeed quite hefty-novel, and a hilarious and smartly crafted one at that.

IT’S TOO BAD that Kenny Fries new book isn’t longer. The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory is so lyrical, economically crafted, and engagingly peripatetic that one wants to keep traveling with its author even after he ends his meditation.

… the aim of Media Queered: Visibility and its Discontents, a new collection of essays that explore the tensions and contradictions of queer people’s changing relationship to mass media and popular culture. …