RONYA OTHMANN’S debut novel, The Summers, begins with a reversal. At the end of the prefatory chapter, the main character, Leyla Hassan, seems to be speaking for the author as she muses: “You always tell a story from its end. … Even if you start with the beginning.” In this way, Othmann announces a departure from traditional chronology in storytelling, a turn toward a more dreamlike structure.
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BLACKOUTS is an unusual novel, blending fact with fiction, a loose sequel to author Justin Torres’ debut novel We the Animals. The narrator, a young man of Puerto Rican descent who spent time in a mental ward as a teenager, travels to a mysterious building known as the Palace out in the desert. There, he meets up with Juan Gay, a much older man whom he knew on the ward. In Juan’s room, the narrator finds a book documenting the lives of early 20th-century lesbians, but with much of the text redacted. Through conversation and exchanging stories, the narrator comes to understand Juan’s connection to this material.
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IN PROSE both tender and assured, Irish-Canadian novelist Emma Donoghue delivers a historical novel that transforms a remote historical episode—a lesbian love affair between adolescents at a British boarding school in 1805—into a universal tale. Learned by Heart explores the evolving psyches of its two main characters as they go against the grain of social convention over the course of one school year, during which their lives undergo dramatic change.
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IN THE FORM OF A QUESTION The Joys and Rewards of a Curious Life by Amy Schneider Avid Reader Press, 288 pages, $28. IF YOU’RE A FAN of…More
Short reviews of the books RAVING: Practices by McKenzie Wark, QUEER PRINT IN EUROPE edited by Glyn Davis and Laura Guy, AMERICAN CLASSICIST: The Life and Loves of Edith Hamilton by Victoria Houseman, and WHEN LANGUAGE BROKE OPEN: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent Edited by Alan Pelaez Lopez; and the film FRAMING AGNES directed by Chase Joynt.
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Kids on the Street is an admirable, thoroughly researched, and carefully documented history of the once vibrant queer culture of the Tenderloin and Polk Street. Featuring scores of interviews with one-time Polk Street denizens, it is also a lament for the displacement of the multiracial, multigender culture of San Francisco’s first post-Stonewall queer district. Drawing attention to that once-thriving, often overlooked culture, the book is a valuable contribution to queer history.
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Mallon’s investigation of Kallman reads like an autopsy, even though the reader is warned that his story “is inspired by actual events considerably altered by the author’s imagination.” Yet there’s an authenticity that’s both frightening and compelling. Mallon has pierced the heart of darkness at the root of Kallman’s soul. Kallman might deserve to be forgotten, but Mallon’s portrait of a sad thwarted tragic talent as a sour parable on ambition is unforgettable.
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Short reviews of To the Boy who was Night: Poems Selected and New by Rigoberto González, So Long: Poems by Jen Levitt, and Romantic Comedy: Poems by James Allen Hall.
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George Austin Dennison and Charles Frank Ingerson’s 55-year relationship is at the heart of The Splendid Disarray of Beauty, and it’s what readers of these pages may find most fascinating.
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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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