Books

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Book Review: ‘My Brother’s Husband’ by Gengoroh Tagame

Japanese illustrator Gengoroh Tagame has drawn erotic gay manga for decades. His innovative work champions hairy and large men, an anomaly in the world of Japanese manga, where skinny, hairless boys tend to be the norm. His exquisitely drafted comics intertwine beauty with BDSM and violence, expanding the boundaries of how eroticism is expressed in comics – and all this, in Japan – a country where LGBTQs are more closeted than in the U.S. Tagame’s latest book, My Brother’s Husband, opens a series that is aimed at decidedly different readers from his earlier work – this story is for an […]

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Book Review: ‘Lethal Care’ by Claire McNab with Katherine V. Forr

Chief Inspector Carol Ashton is about to take on a rather sensational case. In the opening scene of Lethal Care, we are skillfully given a wealth of information in a conversation between Madeline Shipley, of television’s The Shipley Report fame, and her old flame. We learn Carol has recently been promoted to Chief Inspector, that Carol’s son is out of the country and Carol’s relationship with Sybil may be rocky. We also learn Inspector Rooke, who was investigating the death of socialite and media darling, Greta Denby, died under tragic and questionable circumstances, leaving Carol to take up his assignment. […]

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Yrsa Daley-Ward: On Divorcing Analysis from Process and Voicing the Unspoken

I recently spoke with the writer Yrsa Daley-Ward, about her first book, bone, a bold and expansive collection of poems that confront trauma, longing, self-empowerment, and survival with clarity, soundness, and remarkable wit. bone was first published by Daley-Ward herself, a poet-actress-model-songwriter, but soon enough caught the attention of Penguin, which has now issued the collection in the U.S. In the conversation that follows, we discuss the genesis and evolution of the book, Daley-Ward’s approach to composition, and the many challenges of the writing life. Bone is such an expansive book in both breadth and depth—in the time it covers […]

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Book Review: ‘Out for Queer Blood: The Murder of Fernando Rios and the Failure of New Orleans Justice’ by Clayton Delery

  Fernando Rios was a twenty-six-year-old Mexican tour guide lured to his death by a group of Tulane students, who beat and robbed him in a shadowy French Quarter alleyway in 1958. Clayton Delery, the author of Out for Queer Blood: The Murder of Fernando Rios and the Failure of New Orleans Justice, unearthed this crime while researching another travesty in his hometown, the fire at the Up Stairs Lounge. The fire, a monstrous act of arson, was, for decades, the largest single act of terror against LGBT folk in the US–that is, until the massacre at Pulse nightclub. News […]

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Book Review: ‘Some Hell’ by Patrick Nathan

Many of us have sighed, shrugged, and explained to a well-meaning friend, “Oh, thanks for the recommendation, but I’m kind of done with fiction. I’ve gotten into reading [aviation history / comparative religion / cookbooks / insert nonfiction genre of interest].” “But,” the friend insists, “it’s a debut LGBT coming-of-age novel!” That’s when we excuse ourselves to use the restroom, and climb out the window. I’ll confess that I probably would not have chosen to read Some Hell, much less embraced this opportunity to review it, if I had not been familiar with the author’s nonfiction. Patrick Nathan is a […]

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Book Review: ‘Would You Rather’ by Katie Heaney

Would You Rather is a memoir that follows the life and eventual coming out of Katie Heaney who, at twenty-five, had never had sex. The book follows Katie’s life from her days at an undergraduate college to her grown-up life in New York City, working for Buzzfeed. Along the way, she details her crushes on boys, as well as her resistance to intimacy with them, and the shame she feels because of it. The book also integrates her fear of planes, her short-term passion for astrology, and her personal struggle with anxiety. Would You Rather is what I’d call a […]

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“A Crystal Diary:” The Story of a Young Butch in L.A.

Frankie Hucklenbroich’s “A Crystal Diary,” published in 1997, opens with a description of “bouncing baby butches, boiling and bursting with glands.” They stand outside of the lesbian bar they’re too young to frequent, studying the adult butches and femmes as they enter and exit in pairs, wondering what it would be like to be them, wondering what it would be like to fail:  At sex, at intimacy, at everything. But most of all, at doing what Hucklenbroich’s narrator Nicky refers to as the trademark of every great butch: Eating out. “What’s it taste like? What about germs? And how the […]

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Jill Soloway to Launch Topple Books Imprint

When Jill Soloway created TOPPLE Productions she did it to showcase LGBTQ+ and POC voices with shows like “Transparent,” which continues to represent the nuanced storylines of people from all backgrounds instead of silencing them. The multimedia brand is a tool to, as Soloway exclaimed during her 2016 Emmy win, “topple the patriarchy!” Now, Soloway’s company continues to transcend in popular culture with Amazon Publishing’s new imprint, TOPPLE Books.  The company will allow gender non-conforming, women of color, lesbian, bisexual and queer writers the opportunity to have an outlet specifically designed to spotlight their unique voices in storytelling. The imprint […]

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Book Review: ‘The Sparsholt Affair’ by Alan Hollinghurst

Authors of fiction do something for us that goes far beyond the mechanics of plot. They create, or recreate, a time and a place drawn from both their own experiences and their imaginations. Few authors do that with the skill and dexterity of Alan Hollinghurst. He can imagine wholly fleshed characters as complex and detailed as an individual artist as well as his oeuvre—not only the vagaries of their personality, but the whole body of their work—as he did so effectively in his earlier masterpiece, The Folding Star. This understanding of an artist’s skills extends to his own work. He, […]

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Book Review: ‘The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America’ by Isaac Butler and Dan Kois

Isaac Butler and Dan Kois have crafted an extensive oral history of the making of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America that is ingenious by design. Much like a play script itself, the book is structured in a series of “Acts” with chapters more like titled scenes and a cast of characters listed at the end, and documents through diverse interviews–edited in such a way as to create an on-going dialogue–the genesis, history, themes and reception of this queer masterwork. The “cast” for this metanarrative includes Kushner, the actors, directors, producers, and production team, as well as the scholars, historians, critics, and fellow […]

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