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THE HORROR FICTION of H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) is best known for its tentacled monsters, demented occultists, and adjective-heavy phrases like “dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodaemoniacal ghastliness.” Lovecraft’s work appeared primarily in cheap pulp magazines like Weird Tales, and while he died penniless, he is now considered one of the world’s great horror writers. Toys, games, and movies based on his stories continue to pour out of the dream factories, and his writing has been the subject of academic conferences, philosophical treatises, and essays by Joyce Carol Oates. …

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IT HAS BEEN almost three decades since the publication of my novel The Confessions of Aubrey Beardsley, which is being re-issued as a digital edition. This event coincides with the first major exhibition of Beardsley’s work in fifty years, which is scheduled to open at the Tate Britain in London in June (as of press time, after a postponement due to Covid-19). Another Beardsley show is slated to open in Paris at the Musée d’Orsay in October.

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Beardsley’s drawings seem to indicate that he intended to shock, even though he was safely detached from the reality of sexual experience.

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CATHERINE DE’ MEDICI, Dowager Queen of France in the age of Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Rabelais, had bad luck with her sons. Although each was to ascend a throne, as…More

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Along with unilateral nuclear disarmament, [Deming] soon added racial equality to her agenda and, by the end of the 1960s, radical feminism and lesbian rights.

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[A]s Maria DeGuzmán puts it in jargon-laden prose in her new book, Understanding John Rechy, his “critique of U.S. society and its expectations and delusions [is] achieved through the protagonists’ dissent from compulsory heteronormativity.”

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Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s work is widely available in its original German and translated into French and Italian. Two of Schwarzenbach’s books, in English translations by Lucy Renner Jones and Isobel Fargo Cole, have been published by Seagull. Her photographs are in the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern and in the public domain.

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Lemebel’s arc from pariah to celebrated author, embraced by his own people—indeed a queer Chilean folk hero—is unlike any other.

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Gad Beck started out as a gay Jewish boy and ended up leading the most successful resistance cell in Nazi Berlin—and he survived the War.

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