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ANYONE who watches a regular diet of HBO knows that the show Gentleman Jack refers to a real-life English lesbian and landowner of the early 1800s, who is now the charismatic central character in this new series. Anne Lister, born into the scientifically-minded family that produced Joseph Lister and eventually lent its name to Listerine mouthwash, was also one of the great English diarists.

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For Gorey aficionados, this oddly titled doorstopper, Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey, by Mark Dery, which includes a bibliography, endnotes, and an index, will be welcome. The title is odd if the author means to imply that Gorey was only known posthumously, which is anything but the case.

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Berkson … went on to have a distinguished career as a poet, art critic, and teacher. He and O’Hara remained friends, colleagues, and sometime collaborators. For years, he kept a scrapbook about Frank O’Hara, archiving memories, quotations, reproductions of visual art, and other material related to his mentor.

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These poems often connect one gay poet to another in a lovely and poignant way. The late Reginald Shepherd is memorialized by Timothy Liu and Roberto Santiago. The latter re-uses the title “You, Therefore” from one of the best poems in Shepherd’s 2007 collection Fata Morgana for a new poem that is wonderfully reminiscent of Shepherd’s own merger of line-flow and word-banging.

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Lovejoy has done extensive historical research and deploys it well, recreating London in the 18th century down to graphic details, such as the smell of trash and human waste in the streets.

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Flannelwood is a novel about love, loss, searching, and self-discovery. Much of the interaction between Bill and James is sensual and erotic. The narration is realistic but rich, at times bordering on poetic.

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You Will Be Safe Here is smart and well-written, … a remarkably effective novel about the historic tensions that have informed South Africa since its birth. The fact that one of the main characters is gay is just one among a number of tensions.

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[In Stella Maris and Other Key West Stories, Michael Carroll] takes the conventions of the summer novel and twists them inside out, revealing a world of privilege and exclusion while also satirizing a certain strain of gay life that after the 2016 election feels comically out of touch in a world of uncertainty and turmoil.

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“DO I NEED to set down the circumstances?” The narrator, Alec Pryor, confronts the reader with this question on the first page of Murmur: A Novel. Alec Pryor is a thinly disguised version of Alan Turing, the English mathematician who broke the Nazis’ Enigma code in World War II …

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In his “American Novels” series, Norman Lock has previously published novels about Dickinson, Thoreau, Poe, Whitman, and Twain. Feast Day of the Cannibals is the first of his novels to explore the lives of 19th-century men who felt a sexual attraction to each other.

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