MARPHEEN CHANN’S name may not be well-known outside of Maine, where Chann is a community organizer, a public speaker, and recently became Portland’s first Cambodian American elected official, as a member of that city’s charter commission. In his new memoir Moon in Full, he comes across as a tremendously likable, openly gay man who overcame all the odds.

            At first glance, Making Love with the Land looks like a departure from the author’s poetry and fiction, but anyone who has read his earlier work will recognize Whitehead’s characteristic honesty, humor, and deeply traditional worldview in which humans, animals, and plants are interconnected and all equally important.

Grimsley’s tenth novel, The Dove in the Belly, is a worthy but somewhat problematical work that ostensibly shares the theme of Dream Boy and Boulevard, that of a timid, newly out gay man who becomes obsessed with an apparently straight man, with the possibility of violence ever present.

The Impossible Art ends with a magnificent examination of Mozart’s masterpiece Le nozze di Figaro, which Aucoin deems a work capable of transcending opera’s impossibility, indeed a work that “achieves an aerial view of the human soul.” That chapter, “Music as Forgiveness,” the shortest in the book, left me full of gratitude—to Aucoin for writing so beautifully and to Mozart for writing so heartbreakingly.

FOR A 19TH-CENTURY author, Oscar Wilde is astonishingly present in today’s culture—far more mentioned and quoted than even a perennial favorite like Mark Twain. This, I believe, is due to a combination of factors.

The Kingdom of Sand—a smarter reader than I might be able to explain the title—is a book without a traditional plot, and only a writer with Holleran’s skills could manage to hold his readers without the conventional twists and surprises of most novels.