In Toil & Trouble Burroughs writes that he has been a witch since birth and that he inherited his magical talents from his mentally ill mother, someone who has figured prominently in his other books. He doesn’t practice in a coven with other witches but works his magic solo, incanting and occasionally lighting candles to make things happen.
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Paul Baker, a linguistics professor at Lancaster University, has made it the focus of two decades of study and promotion. Fabulosa! presents an engaging version of his dissertation (published as Polari: The Lost Language of Gay Men in 2002). He easily shifts between the complex linguistic genealogy of Polari and its gay cultural history, focusing particularly on the vicissitudes of its usage in the past half century and tracking this usage with gay politics.
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FROM THE START, John Giorno wanted two things in life. In 1958, “I was young and beautiful and that got what me what I wanted and all I wanted was sex,” he recounts in his post-humously published book, Great Demon Kings. What we learn early on in this royal paean to the self is that Giorno (1936–2019), who was a poet, an artist, and an activist, had an insatiable appetite for fame. Upon reading this memoir, one realizes that he possessed a surfeit of libido and ego, in addition to a talent for befriending talented people, to launch him toward this goal.
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THE SLYLY TITLED My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is a joyful combination of biography and memoir, mixing author Jenn Shapland’s discovery of author Carson McCullers (1917–1967) with her own journey toward embracing her sexuality.
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Noted back-country climber David Oates is perhaps best known for Paradise Wild, his manifesto on the way humans fit into the natural world. In that book and in The Mountains of Paris, a recurring theme is his upbringing in a conservative religious household (“I am the gay son they never wanted”).
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What makes this memoir special to some reviewers is that it is a creative nonfiction memoir that involves two women. In it, the narrator recounts her infatuation as a graduate student with an unnamed woman she meets at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. In the Dream House is a phantasmagoria of Machado’s feelings about an abusive relationship with a charming, unstable, upper-class woman years after it ended.
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HOW WE FIGHT for Our Lives is a deeply compelling and personal memoir about growing up black and gay in a world where being either can be challenging, and the combination can be deadly.
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Another important moment in the book comes in a coda that ties up many loose strings, even as it leaves a big one dangling in the form of a last-minute character who hasn’t been present but who seems, in retrospect, to have haunted the story unseen. Just what this character has been up to all this time is a question you may raise upon completing this wonderfully complex novel.
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SET in Communist-era Poland in 1980, Tomasz Jedrowski’s first novel, Swimming in the Dark, is a compelling and tragic story in which two young men fall passionately in love.
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IN 1977, the year in which Carolina De Robertis’ novel, Cantoras, opens, Cabo Polonio was a remote fishing village, a rocky yet serene outcropping on the coast of Uruguay. When the novel begins, its five main characters—Romina, Flaca, Paz, Malena, and Anita a.k.a. La Venus—arrive at the village late at night, having endured a five-hour-long bus ride … They are cantoras, which we learn is a slang term for queer women.
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