Short Reviews
Short reviews of The Paris Express, The Art Spy, Memoir of a Reluctant Giant, Julian’s Debut, The Portable Feminist Reader, and Love in the Lav
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Letting Events Happen
THE IMAGE beckoned: a closely shaved head in profile, double hoop earrings, handwritten neck tattoo above a crisp Oxford collar, typography following the curve of the cranium: Love Me Tender. It was French writer Constance Debré featured on the cover of her first novel translated into English. While the graphics grabbed me, it was the author’s singular voice and the radical simplicity of her enterprise that kept me reading—and made me want more. Now Debré’s trilogy—Playboy, Love Me Tender, and Name—is available in English translations.
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The Fragility of James Baldwin
JAMES BALDWIN The Life Album by Magdalena J. Zaborowska Yale Univ. Press. 320 pages, $28. IN HER NEW BIOGRAPHY of James Baldwin, Magdalena J. Zaborowska is hopelessly in love…More
Art and Sexual Liberation
Desire as Praxis was based on Dubé’s doctoral dissertation at Montréal’s Concordia University. The book includes significant amounts of academic language but also lots of interesting information and ideas that a general reader can appreciate.
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All Over the Map
I could recommend Erica Rutherford based solely for the book’s wealth of vibrant photos. However, it’s the story of Rutherford’s life and the analysis of her works that make the book so worthwhile. I suspect …
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Guided by Joni
The author traces his admiration for the legendary singer-songwriter to his solitary childhood in New Jersey.
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Bi’s in a Triangle
MIDNIGHT AT THE CINEMA PALACE, Christopher Tradowsky’s debut novel, showcases a love triangle between a gay man and a couple whose sexuality is harder to define, especially given its 1993 setting.
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Expatriate Days
PART MEMOIR, part travelog, and part journalistic inquiry, Gaar Adams’ Guest Privileges embraces multiple genres.
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When Broadway Called
THEATER KID is a touching memoir of Jeffrey Seller’s journey from poverty to success as the producer of award-winning but unconventional musicals, offering an entertaining, informative recounting of meetings with colorful investors and theater personalities and discussing lesser-known aspects of producing shows, including advertising and ticketing. He also describes his first gay relationship and, having been adopted as an infant, his search for his biological family.
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The Oedipal Woman
STEPPE OPENS with a description of the great Russian sea of grass as seen from the window of an airplane, but most of this short but haunting novel takes place on a highway—a highway the narrator, a young lesbian poet, shares with her father as he drives a load of pipe in his truck from Moscow to Volgograd.
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