This queer reader approached How to Survive a Plague hesitantly. Might it just be too difficult to return to that painful time: a time when so many friends were dying of AIDS? Well, perhaps the biggest surprise in David France’s
Here’s something you might have missed–this queer reader almost did: Edmund White has written a novel that may well be his best. Take a moment for that to sink in.
Let’s face it: short story collections can be a tough sell. Even the best of them include a few clunkers. Some even throw in some unpublished fragments: bits of what might have been a novel (novella?), but didn’t quite flesh
If you’re looking for a good summer read, consider James Magruder’s Love Slaves of Helen Hadley Hall. It follows the stories of the residents of a Yale dormitory in the school year of 1983-1984. In all the there are
Although a novel, Darryl Pinckney’s Black Deutschland reads like a memoir. The style is simple, direct, conversational, flawless. It’s the the story of an American abroad: a visitor to Berlin in the final days of the wall. His journey from
James Magruder’s short story collection, Let Me See It, is exceptional. Mr. Magruder is a master at dialogue. His stories are perfectly constructed. And he has a literary style that is all his own: minimalist, yet peppered with telling
Bernardine Evaristo’s novel, Mr. Loverman is the story of Barrington: a septuagenarian West Indian man who has finally reached the decision to come out as gay. His ever-shifting, highly complex situation is told from the perspectives of both Barrington and
In the twelve stories comprising Michael Carroll’s Little Reef, the qualities which make him a major new literary talent are on display. Mr. Carroll is a master at dialogue, his characters are three-dimensional and he clearly knows how to
Near the beginning of Michael Cunningham’s new novel, one of the main characters has a potentially life-changing experience: a seemingly celestial being appears to him in the sky above Central Park. What ever this white light cloud formation is, it
Concluding the Tales of the City series was perhaps Armistead Maupin’s most challenging literary task. Concluding an epic novel–let alone a series of novels–involves not only revisiting the key characters and wrapping up their stories, but also the inclusion of