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. …

EVAN FALLENBERG’S Light Fell is a slight, disarming novel about a gay man’s effort to reconcile with his five sons on his fiftieth birthday. Told episodically and in flashbacks, the story introduces Joseph Licht, a man who met and fell in love with Rabbi Yoel Rosenzweig and left his family to go live with his lover.

Book review