A YOUNG American artist, Jenny Kidd, has left a dull job and her overbearing parents behind to come to Venice. In New York, she feels trapped between her parents’ expectations, her need to make a living, and her desire to paint and teach or illustrate. In Venice, hoping that her paintings might provide a livelihood, she also explores her curiosity about lesbianism and her own sexuality. …
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DEAHN BERRINI’S How To Earn Your Keep is a tentative novel, full of almosts. It has aspects of a legal thriller, shadings of chick lit, and something akin to a coming out story, braided into a larger narrative about finding one’s moral compass in trying times. It’s an engaging mix, if hesitant in its delivery. …
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WILLIAM DRUMMOND STEWART was part of the landed aristocracy in 19th-century Scotland, albeit a second son, who ultimately became baronet of Murthly Castle late in life upon the death of his childless older brother. With limited cash and not a lot to do prior to inheriting the title, he set out for ‘pleasure trips’ to the Rocky Mountains, spending several years there as he had adventures and explored the beauty not only of the frontier landscape but also of the young, virile men who flocked to the Rockies to explore and escape as well. …
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IT IS POSSIBLE that you’ve already heard of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, which was a featured selection of Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club, still a potent force in publishing and enough to guarantee that Ayana Mathis’ debut novel would be an instant best-seller. The book is of a piece with many of Winfrey’s selections …
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Steve Finbow has written a brief biography of Allen Ginsberg as part of the Critical Lives series published in England.
More… “How did Proust read?” it begins. “As a child, like all of us: for the plot and characters. But even at a very young age, reading was for him a very serious business, and he was outraged by the fact that it could be considered by grownups as something one did to amuse oneself.” …
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Taylor was rarely given her due as an actor during her career, but she always saw herself as a serious actress: “The emotion has got to be there behind your eyes, behind your heart. You can never act superficially and get away with it.” Certainly her Oscar-winning performance in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1967) lay to rest any lingering doubts about her talent. In the same year, she made the underrated film Reflections in a Golden Eye, based on a Carson McCullers novel, which included a smoldering homosexual subplot. This is one of her most interesting and experimental interpretations, and critics called her performance superb.
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A review of 9 poetry books; Slow Lightning, Divining Divas: 100 Gay Men on their Muses, When We Become Weavers, Among the Leaves: Queer Male Poets on the Midwestern Experience, Lady Business: A Celebration of Lesbian Poetry, Skin Shift, Butcher’s Sugar, and Later Poems Selected and New: 1971-2012.
More[Coal to Diamonds] is a first-person narrative in the straightforward language of a girl from rural Arkansas who escaped a traditional fate of lifelong poverty and oppression by following her dream. …
MoreTHIS FASCINATING STUDY explores three places in Asia and the Pacific where gays have created and defended a community for themselves. Atkins, a communications professor at Seattle University, tells the stories of Bali, Bangkok, and Singapore on their separate journeys to becoming, respectively, the æsthetic capital, the pleasure capital, and the intellectual capital of the region.
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