UZODINMA IWEALA’S powerful, timely novel, Speak No Evil, tells two interrelated stories, told from each of the main characters’ point of view.

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.

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

As Lillian Faderman’s new biography, Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death, reveals, Milk was not the first openly gay politician elected to public office, or even the first politician of significance to be out about his sexuality.

Has the Gay Movement Failed? by Martin Duberman Univ. of California Press 246 pages, $27.95 WHEN A WRITER puts a question mark at the end of a…More

IT IS CHRISTMAS EVE, and Eddy Bellegueule, the protagonist in Édouard Louis’ second novel, History of Violence, is walking back to his apartment after a night out with friends. …

White’s favorite 20th-century Japanese fiction writers are Jun’ichirō Tanizaki and Yasunari Kawabata, and he praises both for showing that “there’s more to contemporary literature than American coffee-cup realism.”What he prizes in these writers, and many others, is strangeness, an idea that runs throughout The Unpunished Vice.