Short Reviews
Reviews of Wilde Stories 2016: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction and DIG by Bryan Borland.
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It Don’t Come Easy
Conley writes of his childhood without overwhelming passion, as if composing a grocery list, though the reader can sense otherwise. At the time, Conley felt all the emotions that go with being shamed, belittled, and quietly bullied.
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Icelandic Meltdown
Set in Reykjavik in 1918 as the large Katla volcano in southern Iceland is erupting, Moonstone unfolds against the backdrop of the island being ravaged by the Spanish influenza epidemic, which accompanied the troops home to Iceland after the close of World War I.
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Out Comes Melville
Melville’s letter, in its entirety, forms the conclusion of The Whale, a novel based on the brief, intense relationship between the first truly great writers of fiction in America.
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Reassessing a 19th-century Novelist
IF WRITER Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840-1894) is remembered today, it is usually for her close friendship and literary rivalry with Henry James. Both writers had made a pact early in their friendship to burn their correspondence, and much of their relationship remains wreathed in mystery.
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Eccentrics Abroad
The Glamour of Strangeness presents more-or-less chronological biographical sketches of six artists who attempted to leave behind both their homeland and their cultural identity in order to become part of a radically different culture, one that allowed them to rework their sense of self.
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The Definitive ‘Miss Bette Davis’
KIRK FREDERICK’S biography of “male actress” Charles Pierce (1926-1999), Write That Down, greets the eye with an iconic photograph of Pierce impersonating Bette Davis, his signature role.
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No Modifier Required
Although [Terrence] McNally’s gay bona fides are beyond question, he resists being labeled a “gay playwright.”
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Am Anfang*
As Whisnant points out, the identity and cultural politics he examines resonate with recent American queer history. Even without that relevance, his work is approachable and engaging.
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Bernard Perlin, an Artist of Many Milieux
The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Bernard Perlin was born in 1918 in Richmond, Virginia. He was sent to art school in New York at age fifteen and had early success as a muralist for Depression-era public works projects.
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