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.

[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.

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.

While the historical information in The Paris Bookseller sometimes feels reminiscent of a history book, the novel’s easy style and tender portrayal of Beach and her friends make for a pleasurable reading experience.

“ONCE WE BEGIN to look for them, we see sissies everywhere,” writes Marlon B. Ross in Sissy Insurgencies, noting that this controversial label can apply not only to such obviously gender non-conforming men as author James Baldwin and singers Little Richard and Sylvester James, but also to figures like educator Booker T. Washington, historian Henry Louis Gates, and basketball star Wilt Chamberlain.

WHAT any reasonable reader wants when picking up a celebrity memoir is a compendium of splashy anecdotes about other celebrities. Oh look! There’s Whoopi! Baryshnikov! Arbus! Channing! Manilow!—“American cultural royalty,” as Alan Cumming calls them. With this as the gold standard, the song-and-dance man with a new memoir titled Baggage: Tales from a Fully Packed Life does not disappoint.

            In its resetting of Dickens, Furnace Creek reads like an entertaining amalgam of the Victorian tradition and Southern Gothic. Newt’s first-person narration is littered with Britishisms (“hob,” “two weeks’ time”) and often carries the highfalutin syntax of social aspiration, but the legacy of the South is never far away …