Enigma Variations is a novel about a man who remains unknowable. Paul is an outsider in many ways. He’s an Italian living in America; he forms emotional attachments to women yet lusts after men; he longs for understanding but keeps people at a distance.

Dominic Janes beautifully demonstrates, long before the Wilde brouhaha, homoerotic expression in the form of dandyism and æstheticism—“camping,” we might call it today—was conspicuous, and often accurately understood, in British society.

In Women Lovers, Barney writes explicitly and unflinchingly about sex (really hot sex) and gender role-play between women, which was extremely courageous for the period. As her biographer Suzanne Rodriguez observes, this kind of unabashed honesty about lesbian sexuality was shocking back then. When writing of her own vulnerability in love, however, Barney exposes an utterly different side of her character: a woman who is wanting, woeful, and wounded—far from the mythical Amazon persona.

The Troubleseeker combines history and mythology from several cultures to tell the story of Antinio, a gay Cuban man, as he searches for freedom and love in the face of oppression and disease. It is narrated by Hadrian, the brilliant emperor of ancient Roman whose male lover Antinous died by drowning at age nineteen, whereupon Hadrian made him a god and had statues of Antinous erected all over the Empire. Hadrian, now a disembodied demi-god with limited supernatural powers, takes an interest in Antinio, actively saving his life on several occasions.

The Disappearing L: Erasure of Lesbian Spaces and Culture by Bonnie J. Morris SUNY. 256 pages, $22.95 IN THE DISAPPEARING L, Bonnie J. Morris writes about a current…More

Before Pictures primarily focuses on art and life in the formative decade prior to 1977. Back then, he was convinced that art critics were the arbiters of what was “historically significant.” Reflecting back upon these early years, he reconsiders: “Coming to the understanding that my knowledge of art can never be anything but partial has been liberating. It has allowed me to write about what attracts me, challenges me, or simply gives me pleasure without having to make a grand historical claim for it.”

The Angel of History is divided into four sections. “At the Clinic” recounts Jacob’s adventure at a mental health clinic one night, as he seeks assistance for traumatic memories and issues that have begun to reassert themselves after years of normalcy. The most interesting of his symptoms is his conversations with Satan.