IF YOU’VE EVER SPENT an afternoon lost in a museum, taking in new and unfamiliar works, then at dinner mistaken your fork for sculpture or the sound of cab tires on wet pavement for angel song, you are well prepared for the enchantments of Darling Endangered.

ALAN HOLLINGHURST’S new novel, The Line of Beauty, begins in 1983, just when The Swimming Pool Library left off—though its leading man is not the confident cocksman of the first book.

Alice Walker’s autobiographical essays have been widely published, and the video of her life (Alice Walker) is eye-opening for its depiction of the Jim Crow world of her childhood, where there were “whites-only” and “colored” drinking fountains, restrooms, and building entrances and exits.

Beyond Shame is a unique and strangely moving account of what went right—and what went wrong—with gay life in America over the past 35 years.

In Sir John Gielgud: A Life in Letters, theatre historian Richard Mangan has compiled reams of Gielgud’s extant letters from 1912 to 1999, which offer a one-sided conversation with everyone from Martin Hensler, Gielgud’s longtime lover, to Judith Anderson and Noël Coward.

Clay’s Way by Blair Mastbaum Alyson Books. 242 pages, $12.95 BLAIR MASTBAUM’S impressive comic debut novel, set in Hawaii, presents the serious love choices of its fifteen-turning-sixteen-year-old narrator…More