March-April 2008
STAND-UP COMEDIANS, because their success usually relies on being able to think in short, epigrammatic bursts, rarely venture into the realm of more extended prose writing. In doing so, Bob Smith has followed the example of comics such as Stephen Fry and Steve Martin by writing a full-length-indeed quite hefty-novel, and a hilarious and smartly crafted one at that.
MoreIT’S TOO BAD that Kenny Fries new book isn’t longer. The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory is so lyrical, economically crafted, and engagingly peripatetic that one wants to keep traveling with its author even after he ends his meditation.
MoreTHE INITIAL IDEA begins with a spark, a curiosity. Sometimes it comes from deep inside, from a secret longing for strange lands I read about as a child in the art and archeology books my parents had stacked in collapsing piles in our living room…
More… the aim of Media Queered: Visibility and its Discontents, a new collection of essays that explore the tensions and contradictions of queer people’s changing relationship to mass media and popular culture. …
MoreAMONG THE GREAT "GAY" QUOTES is one attributed to the English dramatist-poet-spy, Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), but it is probably apocryphal: "All they that love not tobacco and boys are fools." Yet to stress the quotation’s unreliability-it was given in testimony by a government informer-is to miss the more important queer textual evidence in Marlowe’s remarkable Edward the Second (ca.1592).
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FROM THE START of The Dust of Wonderland, whose tone is established in the introduction’s stalking scene, this tale is nothing if not unsettling. The reader is made to feel the main character’s despair and horror, his frustration at not being able to solve a near homicide.
MoreThe Letters of Noël Coward Edited by Barry Day Knopf. 780 pages, $37.50 NOT MANY PEOPLE write real letters now, so those of us who like to read…More
EVAN FALLENBERG’S Light Fell is a slight, disarming novel about a gay man’s effort to reconcile with his five sons on his fiftieth birthday. Told episodically and in flashbacks, the story introduces Joseph Licht, a man who met and fell in love with Rabbi Yoel Rosenzweig and left his family to go live with his lover.
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Book review
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Reviews of the novels: The Sixth Form and At the Bottom of the Sky.
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