Manywhere brings to mind such classic short story collections as Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson, and Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find. However, Thomas delves deeper than loneliness and steers clear of grotesquerie, adding empathy to a narrative mix in which ordinary queer and trans persons work to build fulfilling lives in tough circumstances.
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Shields argues that Raisin in the Sun was so popular to audiences because it was an “old-fashioned” play that dealt with important social issues. Hansberry, however, felt frustrated that so many white critics and audiences missed the main point of the play, which was to challenge class oppression and capitalism. With mini-portraits of the figures and issues that shaped Hansberry’s thought, this biography sheds new light on a remarkable writer and intellectual.
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Secret City flips a light switch on, illuminating over six decades and eleven presidential administrations, from Roosevelt to Clinton. What’s shown is an epic story with a cast of thousands—well-known and forgotten, villains and victims. It’s a history of gay Washington, where the fear of blackmail and the rise of a vast national security apparatus during the Cold War years made being gay especially dangerous.
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The letters show only one side of the relationship (we don’t have Bosie’s replies), but several of them refer to letters that Wilde received from Bosie, among other items. Wilde avoids mentioning his wife and two sons, and even when he refers to “any of them”—other people he knew—there is an implication that Wilde sees his relationship with Bosie as something to be kept apart from the rest of their lives …
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Short reviews of the novels 148 Charles Street, The Other Man, and Young Mungo, and Volume 2 of Samuel Delany’s Occasional Views.
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JOURNALIST Putsata Reang has written a compelling memoir that offers a glimpse into a world that’s not often encountered in LGBT literature.
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Toni Mirosevich’s collection Spell Heaven provides just this pleasure: a chance to settle in, walk around, get a sense of all the characters living in this coastal town full of fishermen and sailors, nurses and professors, people in comfortable homes alongside those who are down on their luck.
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[In Queer Whispers] Carregal reveals how, after the 1970s, feminism and gay liberation were popularly perceived as a foreign influence and a threat to Ireland’s cultural identity.
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In Lote, things are set in motion when Black writer Mathilda Adamarola volunteers to work in the archives of Britain’s National Portrait Gallery, which she does in part in order to pursue her rapturous “Transfixions.” Those that capture her imagination are bohemian and queer figures from the 1920s and ‘30s, such as members of the Bloomsbury Group and the Bright Young Things.
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BEST KNOWN for her poetry, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886 –1961) was also a novelist, memoirist, essayist, translator, and famously the lover of one of the richest women in England, Annie Winifred Ellerman (1894–1983), better known as Bryher. H.D. and Bryher were true lovers for over forty years.
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