This is primarily a tale of one heterosexual man’s obsessive love and even more obsessive jealousy for a woman he eventually dismisses as his social inferior: “To think that I wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die, that I had my greatest love, for a woman to whom I wasn’t attracted, who wasn’t my type!” (Yes, Proust’s “wit” is often classist.)

Other Names is about far more than shifting attitudes about homosexuality or a troubled father-son relationship. It’s about what constitutes one’s identity. What does it mean to be Pakistani or British? To be a son? To be a gay man?

Hound of the Baskervilles has some similarities to McOmber’s 2020 novel Jesus and John, in which the Apostle John and a newly resurrected Jesus try to escape from a labyrinthine villa in ancient Rome.

These stories, in short, are a celebration of gay sex: not comradely affection, not romantic friendship, but actual gay sex. It’s good to have access to them as a reminder of what was possible a hundred years ago.

This translation of Moldy Strawberries—forty years after it was first published—finally offers to English readers this important work of world queer literature.