The novel’s title comes from the title of one of Vuong’s poems. In that poem, he writes: “Say yes. Say yes/ anyway.” Likewise here, in his astonishing love letter to life, Vuong affirms again and again that “the heart’s task of saying yes yes yes.” Anyway. No matter what.

IN WORLD CITIZEN, author David S. Wills conservatively estimates that Ginsberg visited as many as 66 countries in his lifetime. Using the poets letters, poems, travel diaries, and journals, Wills concludes that travel played a crucial role in Ginsberg’s discovery of his creativity and poetic voice.

Joanna Russ, by Gwyneth Jones, is the most recent entry in the University of Illinois Press’s “Modern Masters of Science Fiction” series.

Kahan examines four broad areas of what he calls “minor perversions” (or simply sexualities beyond the stable binaries of “homo-” and “heterosexual”): situational homosexuality (specifically lesbianism); atavistic sexuality in hot climates; the sexuality of the “fairy”; and the standardization of sexuality under capitalist industrialization.

BOTH author-impresario Marc Huestis and dancer Jeff McMahon used Super-8 movie cameras in their work in the 1970s and ’80s. Each has written about his artistic career, and, although they worked in very different fields, both incorporated their burgeoning gay identity into their films and performances.

WILLA & HESPER begins unexpectedly, with Willa, the more lyrical and likable of the two main characters, numbly attempting to process an assault in which she was pressed against a tree, pawed by an unidentified male, and then left to wonder why this attack had to happen outside her childhood temple. Today’s readers will key into the political undercurrents of the novel and the rising tide of hatred that crashes upon the characters in later chapters, when the novel, which begins in the middle of the Obama presidency, catches up to the 2016 presidential election.

THE FLIGHT PORTFOLIO is a fictionalized account of American Varian Fry’s attempt to aid refugees in Vichy France in 1940, before the U.S. entered World War II.

Justify My Sins is clearly a novel rather than a memoir, but the life of the protagonist, Victor Regina, resembles that of the author quite closely.