Jeremy Mulderig claims in his introduction that The Lost Autobiography is one of the great queer diaries of the 20th century (one wonders how many of these there actually are; still, the claim does not seem wildly off base). Here is a witness to some of that century’s great personalities, living defiantly through the strictures imposed by society during those times, and asserting at every turn that he had as much right to be happy as anyone else.
More
ust when you thought you knew everything about the life of Oscar Wilde, there’s more. Making Oscar Wilde turns out to be not just about Wilde, however; it’s about the U.S. at a time when when P. T. Barnum was drawing them in with exhibits like “The Wild Man of Borneo,” minstrel shows were exceedingly popular, and Darwin’s idea that we are descended from apes was on everyone’s mind.
More
Calypso by David Sedaris Little, Brown. 259 pages, $28. OF COURSE the book is funny; it’s by David Sedaris. We’ve known this about Sedaris since the morning of…More
Uglow’s portrait of Lear is intricate and sympathetic, and her analysis of his creative achievements sharp. She is informative about English society and culture in the 19th century, as well as events that were happening abroad. If Mr. Lear is short on details of the nonsense writer’s private life, it seems only in keeping with his exquisite perception of boundaries.
More
Gillian Rodger’s Just One of the Boys is a welcome and fascinating addition to the history of cross-dressed performance and 19th-century Anglo-American theater more generally.
More
Set mostly in the Delta region of Mississippi where [Nick] White was born and raised, the collection (Sweet & Low) is divided into two sections. In a story in the first section, “The Lovers,” a widow slowly realizes the truth about her husband’s secret life after she discovers an unrecognizable pocket watch among her husband’s belongings. …
The stories in the second section are interlinked, focusing on the life of one Forney Culpepper, who matures from childhood to early middle age over the course of six varied and finely crafted stories.
Nicola Griffith’s new novel So Lucky, a slim book about the progress of a little-understood chronic disease, multiple sclerosis, seems unexpectedly narrow in scope when compared to previous efforts. However, the subject matter is partly autobiographical.
More
UZODINMA IWEALA’S powerful, timely novel, Speak No Evil, tells two interrelated stories, told from each of the main characters’ point of view.
More
AT FIRST GLANCE, a title like “Gay on God’s Campus” suggests the depressing old tale of gay people’s suffocation in Bible-fog. In fact, nothing about this book is depressing, and it serves as something of a light in the fog, focused as it is on how gay students and their supporters have succeeded in moving their colleges into, if not exactly the 21st century, at least a reasonably modern way of treating LGBT students.
More
The Damned Don’t Cry, They Just Disappear: The Life and Works of Harry Hervey by Harlan Greene University of South Carolina Press. 184 pages. $29.99 IN 1993, John…More
