In My Ex-Life: A Novel, David Hedges is a fifty-something gay man, a successful college admissions consultant living in San Francisco, who helps spoiled children get into good schools. His boyfriend Soren has left him for an older man, a surgeon; he has become overweight; and his best friend Renata, a realtor, is trying to sell his ocean-view, under-market rental out from under him.

In Forbidden Lives, Norena Shopland cites this spirit of rebellion as an animating force in the lives of the many Welsh LGBT pioneers whose stories she has collected in her book.

[I] found The Last Word to be smoothly written. It was fun to observe someone with a vast catalogue of life experiences and the ability to turn them into witticisms. Reading this book, one can readily understand why Quentin Crisp was such a sought-after dinner guest.

COOKBOOKS by openly lesbian and gay authors have been published steadily over the decades, with Alice B. Toklas leading the charge. Many are fund-raising efforts for gay or lesbian organizations, while others are collections of recipes and reminiscences …

Amy Hoffman’s The Off Season moves along at a swift pace with short, titled chapters. P’town is brought to life with vivid descriptions of the town and its maritime surroundings.

Written in 1904, Hirschfeld presents a picture of gay and lesbian life in Berlin at the turn of the 20th century. We learn about the tea dances, hustlers, drag kings and queens, lesbian bars, cruising, campy humor and kitschy aesthetics, blackmailers, police raids, and gay ghettos.

The Diamond Setter is Moshe Sakal’s first novel to be translated into English. His language flows easily in Jessica Cohen’s translation. A quietly affecting novel, it offers an unusual perspective on a thorny part of the world.

IN HER INTRODUCTION to Sisters in the Life, editor Yvonne Welbon explains the significance of the “minority group” under discussion, namely African-American lesbian filmmakers: “Since the 1922 theatrical release of Tressie Souders’s A Woman’s Error, approximately one hundred feature films have been directed by African-American women. Almost one-third of those films were directed by black lesbians. Statistically about four percent of the adult American population is likely to identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender, but over thirty percent of the feature films have been directed by this minority population.”

The Sparsholt Affair could be said to resemble his second novel, The Folding Star, in being about artists, both real and fictional. The new book can be said to be about the effect of World War II on English society, for good and ill, just as The Stranger’s Child was about the effects of World War I.