BRANDON TAYLOR’S second book, Filthy Animals, is a collection of short stories alternating between connected and stand-alone tales. The linked ones tell the story of Lionel, a Black graduate student in mathematics, and his evolving relationship with a white couple, Charles and Sophie, both dancers.

            In its most basic form, sexual racism is rejecting sex with another person based on race or race-based fetishizing and objectification. According to C. Winter Han, associate professor of sociology at Middlebury College and author of Racial Erotics, the problem is larger than just who desires whom as a sex partner.

            Author E. J. Levy, who holds a history degree from Yale, is especially good at detailing the particulars associated with that world and period. This research is often illuminating, as when the narrator explains that Barry could have neither attended Oxford or Cambridge nor held public office, because the Test Act barred Catholics from doing so.

REFERENCES to extreme weather appear often in this era of climate change, even in the most unlikely contexts. Eva Baltasar’s Permafrost combines the personal with the universal, and the images of permanent ice and other transparent substances operate on several levels.

            Bolla picks up other thematic strands from Statovci’s earlier works. In it, as in Crossing, he explores the aftereffects of a brief but intense relationship. Bolla, too, is characterized throughout by an atmosphere of oppressiveness, with sharp, unrelenting depictions of both sociopolitical and psychological horrors and the devastation that sits at the intersection of these traumas. In all three novels, the Balkan conflicts create an anxious setting for characters who are exploring subversive or transgressive ways of being in a society bound by patriarchal, normative family traditions.

THOSE OF US with both homosexual and leftist tendencies have always been a little squeamish about examining the relationship between the two, flinching when we remember the Communist party line on homosexuality as bourgeois decadence. But in Love’s Next Meeting, Aaron Lecklider tackles this aspect of American history and untangles a complicated story through sometimes oblique but always illuminating analysis.

BILLED as a “memoir” in the subtitle, Punch Me Up to the Gods has the artful structure of a novel. Author Brian Broome begins with the book’s framing narrative: A gay Black man recounts his bus ride through modern-day Pittsburgh.