Tonight the Publishing Triangle Awards will be announced in New York City. Let me say in advance: congratulations to the winners. And also to all the nominees. This year there was a bit of controversy as Band of Thebes’ Stephen
Colm Toibin’s The Empty Family is Great. Read More »
Proving Tolstoy’s statement that “every family is unhappy in its own way,” Alison Bechdel presents us with a uniquely unhappy family. The fact that this family is her own makes this book all the more powerful. Reading it for the
Read Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. Read More »
I knew Vito Russo. And I suppose that’s part of the reason I shed a a few tears at the end of reading Celluloid Activist: The Life and Times of Vito Russo. I’m not going to say that I was
Celluloid Activist: Finally a Biography Worthy of Vito Russo Read More »
After twenty-one years, Armistead Maupin has finally released another Tales of the City book. The result is more literary, more serious and–for me–more emotionally moving than any of Mr. Maupin’s previous books.
Mr. Maupin answers my first question early on:
Armistead Maupin’s New Tales of the City Book is His Best Yet. Read More »
One of my first art memories was a childhood visit to the Art Institute of Chicago. My father had taken me there to see the current exhibition . (I can’t remember what it was.) And along the way we passed
R. Tripp Evans’s Grant Wood Biography is Sublime. Read More »
I love Stephen McCauley’s new novel, Insignificant Others. It is frequently humorous and for this reason, some are referring to it as a “comic novel.” But this term does not do justice to this book. Because it implies a surface
Stephen McCauley’s Insignificant Others is Delightful. Read More »
Edmund White’s City Boy is the kind of book we rarely see in the United States: a literate memoir. It is an important book. And It is also a delightful book. In a conversational–frequently humorous–style, he chronicles his own life
Edmund White’s City Boy: Literate, Historical, Delightful Read More »
Having read William Mann’s classic queer Hollywood history, Behind the Screen, Queer Reader expected his new Katharine Hepburn biography to be very good. It isn’t very good. It’s great. Mr. Mann’s Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn may just
Read William Mann’s Kate. Read More »
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt met with reformers in the Oval Office, he responded to their requests with three cryptic sentences: “I agree with you. I want to do it. Now make me do it.” This possibly apocryphal quotation has become
We think we know them. We’ve seen Picasso’s strangely flattering portrait of Gertrude Stein (painted from memory.) And the famous Man Ray photograph of Gertrude and Alice B. Toklas–looking like the old married couple that they were. Then there is
Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice is Now in Paperback. Read More »