Band of Thebes

Matthew Gallaway Takes on Death, Nightfall, and Fielding

 

Ever since The Gay Recluse's enchanting evisceration of Daniel Kehlmann's uber-bestselling historical novel Measuring the World, I've been enthralled with Matthew Gallaway's examinations of queer characters in literature. (With all that energy and enthusiasm and erudition, he should have his own tv show.) Yesterday he posted an essay on The Millions exploring a trio of novels in which a heretofore straight middle-aged man suddenly becomes infatuated with a young male: This month's The Art of Fielding [[Kindle]] by Chad Harbach, last year's By Nightfall [[Kindle]] by Michael Cunningham, and their great, great forefather Death in Venice [[Kindle]]. 

Matthew is too elegant to say it so bluntly, but apparently Harbach's gay nocturnes hit many false notes. He finds (with added emphasis):

"When Owen sits in the dugout, for example, his contours are “slender-limbed, right knee flipped girlishly over left” and when after Owen’s jaw is shattered, he still looks “beautiful, beautiful, beautiful… possessed of an Asian delicacy.” When the relationship becomes sexual, Owen kisses Affenlight “on the tip of the penis in a womanly way.” After they go to a hotel to (vaguely) “make love,” Affenlight “lay on his side…[in a] a quintessentially feminine posture…[as] with his free hand he caressed Owen’s belly, which itself felt almost feminine, not muscled but soft…”

If encoding man on man sex in female terms wasn't enough of a game-ender, Matthew later explains, "There’s an undercurrent of cognitive dissonance in the many scenes in which Affenlight appears," and "Harbach also adorns Owen with an array of pointless clichés that long ago felt more tired than funny in television sit-coms."

His close readings of Mann and Cunningham are just as essential, and more appreciative. I don't quote them because you are far more familiar with those works, and because you must read the entire essay yourself.

[Please enjoy: By Nightfall jacket designer Henry Sene Yee writes on his blog of this rejected version: "Although it connected with the storyline, we didn't want to suggest that this was a gay novel."]

Brazil's "I Don't Want To Go Back Alone" Wins Iris Prize

The Iris Prize, the world's richest honor for an LGBT short film, has been awarded to I Don't Want To Go Back Alone by Daniel Ribeiro of Brazil. The 16-minute story centers around Leonardo, a blind 15 year-old, who gets a crush on Gabriel, a new boy at his high school and must cope with the jealousy of his best female friend, Giovana.

Andrew Steggall's The Red Bike won Best UK short. Although the Iris Prize was established to honor achievement in queer short filmmaking, since 2008 they have annually named a best feature. This year's winner is August by Eldar Rapaport who took home the Iris two years ago for his short Steam. Now the festival has expanded its honors yet again, to name a best actress and actor in features: Alison Lane won for her work in Going Down in La-La Land [below] and Murray Bartlett won for August.

Born October 13: Kele Okereke

Liverpool born, London raised Kele Okereke was twenty-three in 2005 when Bloc Party released their million-selling debut Silent Alarm which peaked at #3 on the UK charts. Although by that point Kele had been in bands for five or six years, he kept his musical exploits secret from his "super Catholic" Nigerian parents until the album's release. Despite his newfound fame, he continued to study at university, specializing in English literature. Through two more successful albums and subsequent touring, Kele kept his gay life largely hidden, though he did compare himself to Bowie, Molko, and Morrissey. Bloc Party went on hiatus on Halloween 2009 and Kele came out in a March 2010 interview with Butt. Three months later he released his solo album The Boxer. In a few weeks he'll release his second solo effort, The Hunter. Said to be shy, it hasn't stopped him from publicly feuding with Oasis, "the most pernicious band of all time." Today, he's thirty.

Lesbian Family Film The Kids Are All Right To Become HBO Series

Good for Lisa Cholodenko. Deadline Hollywood reports:

"HBO has made a deal to develop  the Oscar-nominated comedy The Kids Are All Right as an hour-long series. Lisa Cholodenko, who co-wrote and directed the Focus Features release, will write the pilot script. I’m told that it will continue the adventures of the five main characters. They were the same-sex partners (played in the film by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore), their son and daughter (played by Josh Hutcherson and Mia Wasikowska) and the biological father of the kids/sperm donor who surfaces and tears the family apart (played by Mark Ruffalo in the film)."

National Book Award Finalists

Very happy for Boston grandmother Edith Pearlman who has published more than 250 short stories over the past 40 years, largely outside the circle of literary recognition. Anyone in need of yet further proof that mainstream houses aren't publishing the best fiction can study these finalists, selected from a total of 315 fiction submissions:

Andrew Krivak, The Sojourn [[Kindle]]
  (Bellevue Literary Press)

Téa Obreht, The Tiger's Wife [[Kindle]]
  (Random House)

Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic [[Kindle]]
  (Alfred A. Knopf)

Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories [[Kindle]]
  (Lookout Books, an imprint of UNC Wilmington)

Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones [[Kindle]]
  (Bloomsbury USA)

Among the five nonfiction finalists is Manning Marable's Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, which repeats earlier reports that the civil rights leader had sex with men before his marriage.

The six YA finalists include Lauren Myracle's much-praised Shine which begins with an antigay hate crime similar to Matthew Shepherd's murder.

Franny Billingsley, Chime [[Kindle]]

Debby Dahl Edwardson, My Name Is Not Easy

Thanhha Lai, Inside Out and Back Again

Albert Marrin, Flesh and Blood So Cheap: The Triangle Fire and its Legacy

Lauren Myracle, Shine [[Kindle]]

Gary D. Schmidt, Okay for Now

The five poetry finalists appears to include at least three LGBT authors:

Nikky Finney, Head Off & Split

Yusef Komunyakaa, The Chameleon Couch

Carl Phillips, Double Shadow

Adrienne Rich, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007-2010

Bruce Smith, Devotions

Winners will be announced November 16 at a dinner hosted by John Lithgow.

Charles Rice-González Reads from Chulito

 

Lou Pizzitola's reading series at the Barnes & Noble at 82nd St. & Broadway is like a modern-day Chautauqua in a world of Kardashian vacuity. Last night, playwright and Bronx Academy of Arts & Dance executive director Charles Rice-González read from his debut novel, Chulito [[Kindle]] to an enthusiastic, overflow crowd. Peeling back layers of machismo and homophobia in the South Bronx, with incessant F bombs and hidden tenderness, Rice-González examines the fraught first love between two teens, Chulito and Carlos, through different high schools and one's departure for college.

Two months ago, Rice-González and Charlie Vazquez published their anthology From Macho to Mariposa: New Gay Latino Fiction [[Kindle]], gathering short stories and novel excerpts from 29 male writers including Rigoberto Gonzalez, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, and Justin Torres. It's the first collection of its kind in a dozen years and so far has been unfairly shortchanged by the mainstream media.

David Cameron's Pro-Gay Conservativism

Last week, Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron gave the keynote address at his party's conference in Manchester, telling reluctant Tories to get on board with full marriage for same-sex couples:

“And to anyone who has reservations, I say this: Yes, it’s about equality, but it’s also about something else: commitment. Conservatives believe in the ties that bind us; that society is stronger when we make vows to each other and support each other.

“So I don’t support gay marriage in spite of being a Conservative. I support gay marriage because I am a Conservative.”

If only we had similar leaders. If only we had moderators at presidential debates who would form a question citing this argument, or candidates who would actually answer.

Yesterday, Cameron announced the UK would slash foreign aid to nations with anti-gay policies, starting with Malawi whose funds were reduced by $30 million for jailing two men who married each other in private. Antigay Uganda and Ghana may be next. Critics point out that the government is only targeting African antigay nations whilst ignoring the religious-based bigotry of, say, Pakistan. Others reject his whole premise, arguing that the broke government had to make cuts somewhere and the claim it's for moral reasons is "rubbish."

Meanwhile, Hugh Grant says Cameron still has a lot to answer for in the wake of the News Corp phone hacking scandal.

(photo: Carl De Souza/AP)

The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst

You've waited seven years for Alan Hollinghurst's follow-up to his Booker-winner The Line of Beauty, and today finally is the American on sale date for The Stranger's Child [[Kindle]]. This gorgeous, over-long novel spans a century, ample time to explore two prime Hollinghurst preoccupations ever since The Swimming Pool Library, the elusive nature of biography and the legacy of gay life. In 1916, Cecil Valance, a vaguely Brooke-ish young poet visits his quasi-boyfriend George Sawle, flirts with every living creature including George's younger sister Daphne, scribbles a poem, and soon enough gets himself killed in the Great War. His ambiguous lines, made famous by Churchill's quoting them, lead to decades of speculation and scholarship. Though the novel's five sections, each roughly twelve to twenty years apart, come from different points of view, in different settings, a hovering presence is Daphne. She will certainly bring to mind Briony Tallis in Atonement, seen from confused adolescence to confused old age, refracted again through the story's own literature. Sixty years after Cecil's poem, Daphne pens her memoirs. At each stage readers may catch echoes of Britain's best of that era: Forster in the first, Waugh in the second; maybe Murdoch in the third, set in the 60s, when new couple Peter and Paul (eventually, Cecil's biographer) will become apostolistic about the importance of gay culture. Each mirroring their moment, the opening section is extremely leisurely paced and dappled in golden light; the final section, in 2008, is short and rushed and possibly a bit brutal. Brilliant in its subtle structure, The Stranger's Child is Hollinghurst's most ambitious novel but not his most satisfying. Of course, it remains mandatory reading, a beautifully written, exceptionally intelligent daisy chain of ideas.

Today Is National Coming Out Day

Totally unrelated to today's 23rd annual National Coming Out Day, Michael Musto says Anderson Cooper will reveal something in November. (Kathy Griffin won't squeal.) Meanwhile, Queerty offers a gallery of eight men who came out in the past year, including Judge Vaughn Walker and actor Sean Maher at left.

The Best Americans 2011

Bet you weren't expecting Pulitzer-winner Geraldine Brooks, editing this year's Best American Short Stories, to begin her list of "soapbox" "carps" with:

"1. Enuf adultery eds. Too many stories about the wrong cock in the wrong cunt/ anus/ armpit/ Airedale."

Shocking, right? The spelling, the abbreviation. She is Australian, after all.

Brooks' five other complaints are 2. all love stories should not be bleak automatically, 3. "Foreign countries exist." 4. We're at war yet only two of 120 stories mentioned Afghanistan, briefly. 5. Religion should not only appear in fiction as a punchline 6. And yet there's too little humor overall.

Readers who loved Rebecca Makkai's recent debut novel The Borrower, about Lucy Hull, a children's librarian, and her impromptu road trip with a gay 10 year-old, Ian Drake, will delight in her fourth consecutive appearance in the B.A.S.S., with "Peter Torrelli, Falling Apart." The opening sentence of the story that originally appeared in Tin House:

"When Carlos asked why I would risk my whole career for Peter Torrelli, I told him he had to understand that in those last three years of high school, Peter and I were the only two gay boys in Chicago."

Who wouldn't keep reading?

This year great masters of the form Alice Munro and Yiyun Li are among those authors relegated to the list of 100 Other Distinguished Stories of 2010, along with at least two gay writers, Chris Adrian for "The Warm Fuzzies," from The New Yorker and Peter Cameron for "Heresay" from The Yale Review.

Edwidge Danticat selected openly gay Hilton Als' essay "Buddy Ebsen" for The Best American Essays 2011. The list of 100 distinguished runners-up namechecks at least five queer writers: new Guggenheim Fellow Mary Cappello for "Squalor," Alexander Chee for "I, Reader," Mark Doty for "The Unwriteable," Dale Peck for "Dutcher's Notch," and Andrew Solomon for "To an Aesthete Dying Young." Solomon's essay about his Yale roommate's suicide 24 years after graduation can be read in full here.

Born October 7: John Horne Burns, Herbert List

Born in 1916 in Andover, the eldest of seven children, John Horne Burns graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard, taught at Loomis for five years, and joined the army in 1942. A gay man could do worse than to be stationed in Casablanca, Algiers, and Italy, and a budding novelist could hardly do better than to spend a violent war reading the mail written by enemy prisoners to censor the compromising lines. He used his experiences, including international cross-class pickups in gay bars in Naples, in his first and best known novel The Gallery, a panoramic story-cycle recently reissued by NYROB Classics. As you see from Nina Leen's LIFE magazine photo above, his debut launched him alongside James Michener and Irwin Shaw. Alas, their career trajectories diverged. Two years later, in 1949, Burns suffered a typical second novel comedown in Lucifer with a Book, and retaliated by moving permanently to Italy. He published his third novel, mawkishly titled A Cry of Children, in 1952, again greeted by bad reviews or critical silence. He suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in 1953 and died at 36. According to Gore Vidal, Burns said "To be a good writer, one must be homosexual."

Part Jewish and all gay, Herbert List fled his family's Hamburg coffee brokerage business in 1936 and traveled through free Europe taking many of his best known photographs. He was in Greece shooting pictures like this front and this back when Germany invaded the country in 1941. List was forced to return home and later had to join the German army. He spent 1944-45 in Norway making military maps. After the war he joined Magnum but for whatever reason he didn't take many photos. He published three major books of earlier work and eventually gave up photography altogether to concentrate on his drawings, which are currently on view at the gay museum in Berlin. I saw them last year and was charmed by his light touch, bright colors, and happy nude gay couples. In 1988, Stephen Spender finally published his novel The Temple, a roman a clef of his pre-War years in Germany, which includes a List-inspired character named Joachim. List died in 1975 but his style lives on in the work of Herb Ritts and Bruce Weber, among others. Check this Slate gallery of sixteen images.

Captain Harding's Six-Day War

Elliott Mackle's third novel Captain Harding's Six-Day War gains traction in its second half with the crash of an F-105 near Wheelus Air Base five miles east of Tripoli in June 1967. The pilot, a married major, attempted an unauthorized loop and instead hit the sand. The wreck underscores the anxieties of the closeted narrator, Captain Joe Harding, 26, who comes to believe the accident was a suicide and the major intended for his wingman, who may have been going down on him, to go down with him. The very distraught lieutenant survives, yet rather than accept help from someone "like us," he threatens to expose "Captain Cocksucker" to the base's ranking, already suspicious homophobes. The novel links Harding's fear of being outed with his fear of intimacy, all the way back to his abusive father. By that point, he's juggling three suitors: the bald, "muscular pug" Major Hal Denman, 35, who limits their encounters to rubdowns and handjobs; the far more flexible, and needy, nurse Duane Hayes, also 35, who takes him to an all-male sex party and wants to settle down; and Cotton Boardman the puppyish, Shakespeare-quoting, high school tennis star who says he's "seventeen, AAALLL-most." Women in minor roles, Cotton's mother who is the U.S. ambassador, and a straight black nurse, Merlene Williams, are nicely sketched. Mackle, a USAF vet once stationed at Wheelus in the 1960s, keeps his eye trained on the many intrigues at the base and opts not to explore any possible parallels of closeted life and/or secret subcultures in Tripoli. The Libyan characters are an undelineated chauffeur and a one-dimensional blackmailing murderer. Lethe Press classifies the novel as "gay romance" so the hopeful ending is assured. Check out his previous books, Hot off the Presses and It Takes Two.

Ashbery To Receive National Book Award Lifetime Achievement Medal

In the past six years, the selection committee for the National Book Award's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters has a fifty percentage average for honoring LG writers with its loftiest prize. Following Adrienne Rich in 2006 and Gore Vidal in 2009, John Ashbery, will join the elite group on November 16. Much earlier winners include Saul Bellow, John Updike, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, and the essential Eudora Welty. Many literary readers were shocked when the foundation went populist, awarding the literature prize to Stephen King in 2003 and Judy Blume in 2004, while more deserving authors were ignored.

One Reason To Keep Living Until February 28, 2012

Here's the jacket for Peter Cameron's sixth novel, Coral Glynn, which FSG will release February 28. Impossible that I could be made any happier but, look, the publisher's description doesn't degay it:

"Coral Glynn arrives at Hart House, an isolated manse in the English countryside, early in the very wet spring of 1950, to nurse the elderly Mrs. Hart, who is dying of cancer. Hart House is also inhabited by Mrs. Prence, the perpetually disgruntled housekeeper, and Major Clement Hart, Mrs. Hart’s war-ravaged son, who is struggling to come to terms with his latent homosexuality. When a child’s game goes violently awry in the woods surrounding Hart House, a great shadow—love, perhaps—descends upon its inhabitants. Like the misguided child’s play, other seemingly random events—a torn dress, a missing ring, a lost letter—propel Coral and Clement into the dark thicket of marriage. 

"A period novel observed through a refreshingly gimlet eye, Coral Glynn explores how quickly need and desire can blossom into love, and just as quickly transform into something less categorical.  Borrowing from themes and characters prevalent in the work of mid-twentieth-century British women writers, Peter Cameron examines how we live and how we love—with his customary empathy and wit."

May as well order it now so you don't forget.

Openly Gay Job Seekers Less Likely To Get Interviews

Much has been made of the worst statistic in a study published yesterday in the American Journal of Sociology, showing that perceived straight candidates get job interviews at a rate 40% higher than otherwise identical candidates who are openly gay. Yet the headlines could just as easily trumpet the fact that "minimal differences were found for California, Nevada, Pennsylvania and New York."

Harvard researcher András Tilcsik sent out 3,400 resumes, half from a fictitious progressive candidate and half from a fictitious candidate who was treasurer of the university's gay group. The former was invited for an interview 11.5% of the time, while the latter got only a 7.2% response.

No surprise, the lowest response rates for the gay candidate came from "states in the South and Midwest – Florida, Ohio and Texas."

The disparity in callback rates between the perceived straight and openly gay candidates were even greater "when the employer described the ideal candidate for the job as 'assertive,' 'aggressive,' or 'decisive.'" The Hungarian-born Tilcsik "served on a coastguard rescue team in a coastal community in the Welsh countryside for two years before enrolling at Harvard."

Giller Prize Shortlist

What must Esi Edugyan do to get a US publisher to release her Half-Blood Blues? The novel is a Booker finalist and now appears on the Giller Prize short list. The only other title honored on both lists is also a second novel, Patrick deWitt's darkly rollicking The Sisters Brothers about a pair of professional killers in California in 1851.

David Bezmozgis,The Free World
Lynn Coady, The Antagonist
Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers
Esi Edugyan, Half-Blood Blues
Zsuzsi Gartner, Better Living Through Plastic Explosives
Michael Ondaatje, The Cat's Table

So Says Sendak

The part of you that's weary of tiptoe diplomacy and cheap politeness may find a friend in 83 year-old Maurice Sendak, recently out after a nearly-fifty-year relationship with a psychoanalyst named Eugene. On the publication of his new book, Bumble Ardy, the Guardian's wonderful Emma Brockes stopped by his Connecticut farm for a friendly visit. Sendak spoke about

Childhood: "I refuse to lie to children. I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence."

Ebooks: "I hate them. It's like making believe there's another kind of sex. There isn't another kind of sex. There isn't another kind of book! A book is a book is a book."

Publishers: "They're all in trouble. They're all terrible."

The far right: "These Republican schnooks would be comical if they weren't not funny."

Where the Wild Things Are: not his favorite

His favorite: Outside Over There

Stephen King: "Bullshit."

Salman Rushdie: "That flaccid fuckhead. He was detestable."

Gwyneth Paltrow: "I can't stand her."

Roald Dahl: "Scary guy. I know he's very popular but what's nice about this guy? He's dead, that's what's nice about him."

His love of Middlemarch and his disappointment with Daniel Deronda: "Oy gevalt! She put aside her hard hat and was determined to be sweet and understanding. That won't get you anywhere, honey."

His parents: "They led desperate lives. They should have been crazy."

His partner: "He was a man who loved music and reading. He never smoked and he died of lung cancer, utterly ridiculous."

Being closeted and taking his partner home to his parents: "Of course, they knew. Especially my father. My mother was so bewildering and strange and lived in another world, I don't know what she knew. Nothing was said, but if something had been said, I would have been thrown out of the house. And yet they met him and respected him. Strange."

His dog Herman [Melville]: "He's German. He doesn't know I'm Jewish."

Himself 1: "I'm a lucky buck."

Himself 2: "I'm totally crazy, I know that. I don't say that to be a smartass, but I know that that's the very essence of what makes my work good. And I know my work is good. Not everybody likes it, that's fine. I don't do it for everybody. Or anybody. I do it because I can't not do it."

Himself 3: "I can't believe I've turned into a typical old man. I can't believe it. I was young just minutes ago."

Read the full article for more, including his painful barmitzvah story, his work with Isaac Bashevis Singer, his loneliness without Eugene, and his wish to die like William Blake.

(photo via)

Born October 4: Robert Wilson

Nothing about Robert Wilson is easy. He’s a perfectionist to the tiniest detail, spending three hours to choose the stage lighting for a single hand gesture, with a colossal vision, creating a theater piece in the 1970s performed on a mountaintop in Iran lasting seven days, who can’t even be neatly labeled a director because he is also a dancer, a painter, a sculptor, a furniture designer, and an installation artist who won the Golden Lion at the 1993 Venice Biennale. He’s created theater works that are twelve hours long and operas that are silent. He uses austere sets, very slow pacing, and has said that the most important actor on the stage is the lighting. He’s never known the easy road. He grew up with a severe speech impediment in Waco, Texas, studied business administration at UT, came out to his disapproving father, moved to Brooklyn, got a degree in architecture, couldn’t cope, moved back to Waco, tried to kill himself, was put in an institution, got help from an understanding psychiatrist, moved back to New York, saw a black boy being beaten by cops in 1968 and ended up adopting him. Wilson also became the world’s leading avant-garde director of theater and opera. Working with Philip Glass in 1976, he created the monumental opera Einstein on the Beach, about “general relativity, nuclear weapons, science and AM radio,” touring again next year. Its huge success made both men famous worldwide, and since then Wilson has been in great demand at the top opera houses around the globe. His frequent collaborators include Jessye Norman, Laurie Anderson, William S. Burroughs, David Byrne, Allen Ginsberg, and Tom Waits.
    Even honoring Wilson isn’t easy. For the 1984 Olympics, he created another twelve-hour opera, about the Civil War, working with six composers from six countries, each scoring a two-hour section to be premiered in their own country, then to be performed all together, on one day, in Los Angeles. Four sections premiered as planned in Cologne, Minneapolis, Rome, and Rotterdam, but the Olympics canceled the event due to lack of funding. The Cologne section was performed in Cambridge, Mass. in 1985 and the Pulitzer Prize jury unanimously chose it for their drama award, only to have the Pulitzer supervisory board overrule them, giving no drama prize that year.
    Recently, in addition to his theater work, he’s been creating video portraits. (His 2005 shoot of Brad Pitt in boxers in the rain against an electric blue background became the cover of Vanity Fair in December 2006.) The documentary Absolute Wilson was released in 2006. Today, he's 70 and tonight BAM celebrates with the US premiere of his Three Penny Opera with the Berliner Ensemble.

The Art of Fielding

How queer that Chad Harbach's debut novel should bring me closer to readers who won't touch gay books but ever since it's splashy acquisition I've found myself hawing and hemming, Uh, yeah, um, no way. Sorry, I mean, no thanks. It's just, I, uh, I'm not like that. 528 pages about baseball?

Ick.

Yet the reviews of The Art of Fielding [[Kindle]] have been generally stellar and for two weeks now it's been in the NYT top 10. Nice reminder for the naysayers who claim readers won't go for gay stories: Two of the novel's five main characters are gay men who embark on a tricky romance, the main protagonist's bi-racial baseball teammate/ roommate, Owen Dunne, and their sixty year-old, liberal arts college president, Guert Affenlight, a Melville scholar. On the other hand, it's a debatable victory for openness as the book's flap copy and many of the reviews avoid the gay storyline.

Michiko Kakutani raves the book

"is not only a wonderful baseball novel--it zooms immediately into the pantheon of classics, alongside The Natural by Bernard Malamud and The Southpaw by Mark Harris--but it's also a magical, melancholy story about friendship and the coming of age that marks the debut of an immensely talented writer...Mr. Harbach has the rare abilities to write with earnest, deeply felt emotion without ever veering into sentimentality, and to create quirky, vulnerable and fully imagined characters who instantly take up residence in our hearts and minds. He also manages to re-work the well-worn, much-allegorized subject of baseball and make us see it afresh, taking tired tropes about the game (as a metaphor for life's dreams, disappointments and hopes of redemption) and interjecting them with new energy. In doing so he has written a novel that is every bit as entertaining as it is affecting...."

Literary types will have much to relish, according to the NYTBR: "Besides Lowell and Melville, there are explicit or implicit references to Emerson and Dickinson and Whitman, to Death in Venice and A Prayer for Owen Meany." Read it now before the HBO adaptation prodcued by Scott Rudin.

2011 has no shortage of disappointments but with this novel, Justin Torres' We the Animals, and Garth Greenwell's Mitko, it's a great year for gay debut novels.

Occupy Wall St.

Check back for more photos from my first visit to Liberty Square. (Notice a young person is reading an actual book.) The leaderless Occupy Wall St. protests have expanded to DC and to Los Angeles.