Everybody knows that the Bird is the Word
Language and Sexuality by Deborah Cameron and Don Kulick Cambridge University Press 176 pages, $21. (paper) “WHAT IS SEX?” Language and Sexuality opens with a question that was…More
Browsing: Book Review
Blog Posts
Not for Every Coffee Table
Art—A Sex Book John Waters and Bruce Hainley Thames & Hudson 208 pages, $29.95 (paper) The comedies of John Waters are practical exercises in æsthetic philosophy. This theme…More
Loving Him Madly
The Concrete Sky is a bona fide page-turner, one of those stories that could go in just about any direction and ultimately does. Despite the sometimes implausible plot turns, Moore makes you care about his boys on the run and offers satisfaction that two mismatched people can find each other despite the chaos in their lives.
MoreDid Being Gay Matter?
Rick Whitaker introduces the essays in his new book, The First Time I Met Frank O’Hara: Reading Gay American Writers, by suggesting that a writer’s sexuality may influence not only what he writes, but also how he writes. While this is nothing new in the realm of literary inquiries, it’s a worthy question and will snag the attention of many readers.
More
Short Reviews
Reviews of The Strange Case Of Edward Gorey, The Sharon Kowalski Case: Lesbian and Gay Rights on Trial, Contemporary Dynamic Approaches, and Natural Trouble.
More
Hunks in the Hollow
War Against the Animals by Paul Russell St. Martin’s Press. 358 pages, $24.95 THE PREMISE of Paul Russell’s fifth novel, War Against the Animals, quickly unspools to reveal…More
Going Native
Margaret Mead (1901-1978) is a fixture in the American imagination: a superhero of anthropology; intrepid explorer; a woman leaps and bounds ahead of her time. Mead’s bisexuality and her lifelong relationship with like-minded anthropologist and writer Ruth Benedict, which Lois W. Banner explores thoroughly in Intertwined Lives, is not an entirely new thesis.
MoreA Connoisseur of Other People’s Business
Of all the famous people that Beaton wrote about, Hepburn received his most extreme wrath. He found her lacking in feminine grace and manners and accused her of being miserly and a bully.
More
Was Wilde just the product of his times?
Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions Edited by Joseph Bristow Univ. of Toronto Press. 334 pages, $60. Tame Passions of Wilde: The Styles of Manageable Desire by Jeff Nunokawa Princeton…More
They Shared Everything Except this Book
Stephen Harold Riggins and Paul Bouissac have shared an interesting life, having traveled the world and crossed paths with such intellectual luminaries as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Allan Bloom, Michel Foucault, A. J. Greimas, and John Cage. But in The Pleasures of Time: Two Men, A Life, Riggins attempts to provide more than a romantic travelogue or eyewitness intellectual history.
More