CATHERINE LACEY’S new book, Biography of X, is an innovative novel chronicling the life of an influential, outré, fictional performance artist named X, narrated by her grief-stricken widow, an investigative reporter, CM Lucca, who is contemplating suicide. Angered by a recent unauthorized biography of X written by a man who never even met her, CM decides to write her own “corrective” biography of X.
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Shapiro has many reasons to be cheerful. He is tall and good-looking and has a devoted husband, a great job, famous friends, and a singing voice that landed him a job with the band Pink Martini. For those of us less blessed, all of this can be a bit overwhelming. What makes The Best Strangers in the World worth reading is the inside view it provides on reporting the news for NPR and on being a gay man in this world, one who came of age in the 1990s.
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Death in the Sauna exposes the political, financial, and international world of AIDS research, showing that not all such organizations are as altruistic as they appear: greed and corruption rear their ugly heads. It also brings to light the homophobic forces working against these organizations, which force men like Lister to remain in the closet to keep the funding flowing.
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In his reconsideration of Midnight Cowboy, Jon Towlson suggests that, when seen from all of these perspectives, the film represents an important turning point in the presentation of gay themes—not quite a celebration of gay male bonding but a crucial step in this direction and thus a forerunner to many films that followed.
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TAYLOR MAC is a boundary-breaking theater artist whose creativity and accomplishments defy categorization. In a career spanning 25 years to date, the actor, playwright, performance artist, director, producer, and singer-songwriter has racked up a slew of awards and nominations in their many fields of endeavor. Their work has attracted the attention of numerous scholars and writers, whose critical essays on Mac have been collected by David Román and Sean F. Edgecomb in the aptly titled The Taylor Mac Book.
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THE AMERICAN classical music composer Samuel Barber (1910-1981) grew up in wealthy suburban Philadelphia, part of a music-loving family that included his aunt, Metropolitan Opera star contralto Louise Homer, and her husband Sydney, a minor composer. As a result, young Sam was able to meet and move in the world of the major figures in the East Coast classical music scene at an age when most music students would have just been looking on in awe from afar.
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The title of this collection hints at the author’s general approach to his subject matter. He expresses himself as a humble guest at every “feast” he attends, not the host or the guest of honor. In the title essay, the reader is given a tour of Enniscorthy, the town where Tóibín was born in 1955, and where Irish history seems to be embodied in the land itself.
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Along the way, the novel recounts the poet’s early life as the daughter of the founder of the Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, a credential that would become a liability after the Bolshevik Revolution, her mother’s death, and the poet’s marriage at nineteen to Sergei Efron, who would later enlist in the White Army during the Russian Civil War.
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The plot, if Hugs and Cuddles may be said to have a plot, concerns the narrator’s obsession with the “engineer,” a childhood friend with whom he innocently used to wrestle, “working surreptitiously so our true intentions could remain unnoticed.” “Our dicks,” the narrator notes, “were ahead of our maturity.”
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Best Minds follows the poet through his rise to countercultural stardom in the 1960s and after. It touches on Ginsberg’s close relationship with Orlovsky, who was addicted to drugs—a complicated bond that warrants more attention than it receives in the book. Weine acknowledges that Ginsberg was no saint (as the poet’s defiant membership in the North American Man/ Boy Love Association makes clear), but his faith in his mentor remains steadfast.
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