The essays in Willa Cather’s Pittsburgh look at the novelist’s creative incubation from idiosyncratic angles. They describe Cather’s work, connections, and ambitions as a young adult, and several neatly assess characters in her early fiction who disdain heteronormative expectations. The book’s notes are useful, though a brief chronology might make it easier to navigate these essays.
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The title character, Better Davis, is a drag queen who comes vividly to life in her own story. There is great humor in this account as she portrays Bette Davis going blind in the movie Dark Victory.
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IN THIS SWEET debut collection of love poems, What Are the Men Writing in the Sugar?, Matty Bennett puts a first serious gay relationship on a pedestal to admire it from every angle.
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As happens in so many memoirs by gay men, Sharif was bullied as a child. His parents were divorced and he was shuttled from home to home when he was young, from Canada to the Middle East, wherever his family members lived. Still, he came of age in what most would consider a comfortable life.
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The world of The Membranes is familiar to us in 2021 but was quite prescient in 1996. In this version of Earth, the planet has been ravaged by climate change, humans have retreated to domes under the ocean, cyborgs have become cheap labor, and giant media conglomerates control what information we have access to in our day-to-day lives.
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THE CALM, beautifully aged face of the poet Adrienne Rich gazes at the reader from the new book by her friend, Ed Pavlic, who explains that his relationship with Rich began when she (as a contest judge) chose his first book of poems for a prize, and they began exchanging letters in 2001.
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Reviews of Of Solids and Surds, Occasional Views, Volume 1 “More about Writing” and Other Essays by Samuel R. Delany; Home Stretch by Graham Norton; and Take Down Portraits: Drawings and Portraits by Larry Stanton by Winthrop Smith
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The overall message in ¡Hola Papi! is that each of us is in charge of the narrative we tell ourselves about our lives. Indeed, each story is a variation on the idea that it’s important to unlearn a tendency to be overly critical of oneself, or, as he puts it, to marshal “the courage to express myself in ways I hadn’t allowed myself to before.”
MoreONE THEME of this extraordinary exploration of a hidden gay story concerns the lessons parents teach their children—two sons, in this case, coming from vastly different circumstances.
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For many people, these paintings seemed to expose the true, animal nature of humanity, which, after the devastation of two world wars, could no longer be viewed as civilized or a force for good.
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