Band of Thebes

From the NYTR "By the Book" Interview with Hilary Mantel

Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how):

Hilary Mantel: "I’d like to be at home, in my apartment by the sea in Devon, just a few yards from the waves, sitting in the sunshine by a window, smiling, and picking up some vast immersive novel, like Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith [Kindle]: a book which, when it was new, I read as if I were a child, utterly thrilled and beguiled by it. In my ideal reading day there would be no time limit, no e-mails stacking up, and dinner would appear on a floating tablecloth, as if brought by spirit hands. In practice, this never happens. I read in snatched hours on trains, or late at night, or purposively and on a schedule, with pen in hand and a frown of concentration. But when I think harder . . . my ideal reading experience would involve time travel. I’d be 14, and in my hand would be the orange tickets that admitted to the adult section of the public library. Everything would be before me, and I would be ignorant of the shabby little compromises that novelists make, and I would be unaware that many nonfiction books are just rehashes of previous books by other writers. My eyes would be fresh. I would be chasing glory."

Here's the whole interview. And do read Fingersmith. Or Affinity.

Howard Redux: Jacobson Wins Bollinger Wodehouse Prize Again

Need a laugh? Booker winner Howard Jacobson has become the first author to twice win the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, the UK's only award for funny literary novels. Having won the inaugural prize in 2000 for The Mighty Walzer, he's got it again now for Zoo Time, about a blocked novelist in love with his wife and her mother. It beat these four finalists:

• Joseph Connolly – England's Lane
• Helen DeWitt – Lightning Rods
• Michael Frayn – Skios
• Deborah Moggach – Heartbreak Hotel

Previously the prize has been awarded to Gary Shteyngart for Super Sad True Love Story, Geoff Dyer for Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, Terry Pratchett, Ian McEwan, Jonathan Coe for The Rotters' Club, and Marina Lewykca for A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, among others.

Born May 13: Armistead Maupin, Bruce Chatwin, Rupert Smith, Alan Ball

Growing up in a prominent conservative Southern family in North Carolina, Armistead Maupin always knew he was gay yet his natural reserve kept him from acting on those feelings until after college, after serving in the Navy, when he was twenty-six. He came out the year he turned thirty. Good thing, because 1974 is also when he began publishing his panoramic observations about San Francisco and its pansexual inhabitants in the Marin paper, The Pacific Sun. In hindsight the next steps look obvious -- move the column to the Chronicle in 1976, morph them into a novel called Tales of the City in 1978, repeat, repeat, and achieve literary renown as the creator of one of the most cherished character driven book series of the century. The film adaptations in the early 90s starring Laura Linney and Olympia Dukakis were widely praised and greatly loved, and, inevitably, vociferously attacked by conservatives, especially because the first film was shown on PBS. Several state legislatures in the South officially condemned the series. No surprise, the frightened suits at PBS ignored the record breaking ratings and awards, instead opting to cancel the sequel. Enter Showtime, which produced the next two adaptations and earned a total of six additional Emmy nominations. Maupin's bravery in print was matched in action, fighting aids and for gay rights. Author of three other novels (Maybe the Moon, The Night Listener, Michael Tolliver Lives), he has written the screenplays for four adaptations of his work and wrote the excellent narration for The Celluloid Closet. After a twelve-year relationship with Terry Anderson, Maupin met and is now married to Christopher Turner. Last year they left their beloved San Francisco and moved to Santa Fe, where he is working on a new novel. (photo by sfleo67)

A contemporary heir to Patrick Leigh Fermor's genius in travel writing, Bruce Chatwin's literary talent was matched by his personal panache. So brilliant, so handsome, so acclaimed, so willing to buck British convention, yet so tormented by his own prejudices. Unable to accept that he was gay, he married a woman, Elizabeth Chanler, in 1965, when he was twenty-five, and exclusively pursued men throughout their fifteen years of marriage. (She didn't mind, although she did ask for a separation in 1980.)

Chatwin's reflex for making up cover stories appears to have extended into his nonfiction. The local people of his marvelous travel books like In Patagoniaand The Songlines disputed the accuracy of some of his writing, claiming he embellished or created characters and conversations described as fact. Many episodes in those essays only make sense if you realize he is sleeping with the men he meets. Although there's nothing outright gay in his much loved first novel On the Black Hill, it concerns two long-time bachelor brothers who sleep in the same bed for decades. Even when he was dying at forty-eight in 1989, he remained so closeted he said he had a rare, fatal blood disease contracted in China from a bat bite, rather than say he had aids. One of his lovers was Jasper Conran; Chatwin died in the South of France in a house owned by Jasper's mother, Shirley Conran, and his ashes were scattered near Leigh Fermor's home in the Peleponnese.

Rupert Smith's output is so big and versatile he needs three names to cover it. His own literary fiction includes most recently the award-winning Man's World which follows two storylines of gay Londoners decades apart, both revolving around a trio of similar types made memorable by individual quirks: a quieter man whose best friend is screamingly camp and whose off-again-on-again lover is a hot bloke with serious self-acceptance issues. As in The Swimming-Pool Library, the historical characters (and the old men they become) are more interesting than the funnier but shallower contemporary club denizens. Rupert James is his name for swift, swirly commercial Jackie Collins-ish fiction like Silk and Step Sisters. And James Lear delivers gay erotica in clever settings with actual wit: a country house whodunit (The Back Passage), a murder on a long journey aboard the legendary train The Flying Scotsman (The Secret Tunnel), a Civil War romance between a spoiled white heir and a runaway slave (Hot Valley), and a Robert Louis Stevenson-style romp through Scotland in the 1750s (The Low Road). A brand new James Lear book comes at you next month. Generously, Rupert has posted on his site a list of his 101 favorite novels with a wonderfully opinionated paragraph about each. At #17 is Arnold Bennett's 1908 classic The Old Wives' Tale.

Could a plastic bag caught in the wind on a lower Manhattan street change your life? Alan Ball watched one float for ten minutes and made it a hallmark of his first movie script, American Beauty, which won five Oscars including best picture, best director, best actor, and his own best screenplay. He parlayed that success into writing and directing his gay-positive mortuary series Six Feet Under, for which he earned an Emmy, a DGA, and a PGA. It lasted five seasons and won a total of 46 awards. Ball returned to feature films in 2007 with Towelhead, and continued his partnership with HBO with the supremely sexy, bloody, metaphorical, vampires as minorities ("God Hates Fangs"), Emmy-winning True Blood that launches its sixth season next month. Ball and his partner live next door to another Oscar winning writer-director, Quentin Tarantino, who sued Alan in March 2011 over the "obnoxious pterodactyl-like screams" of their exotic bird aviary. 

Born May 9: Alan Bennett

Much of Alan Bennett’s career as a playwright, screenwriter, author and actor been devoted to wry or gently comic emotional cripples, inhabiting worlds where happiness is as suspect (very) as it is unlikely (highly) and where unrequited love is a redundancy. His best known works are the adaptation of Prick Up Your Ears (gay playwright Joe Orton murdered by his lover), An Englishman Abroad (gay traitor Guy Burgess), The Madness of George III (crazy king), A Question of Attribution (another gay traitor, Anthony Blunt), and of course The History Boys. In 2011 reader Gary reminded me about Bennett's highly successful series of humorous and touching monologues, Talking Heads, which can be seen online. (Lovingly spoofed by Stephen Fry in drag.) The son of a Northern butcher, Bennett was accepted at Cambridge but, following a boy who didn’t like him, switched to Oxford where he took a first in history and, in 1960, joined Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, and Jonathan Miller to appear in the instantly famous comedy revue Beyond the Fringe. He also performed in The Secret Policeman’s Ball and The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball. Although he has been with his current partner, Rupert Thomas, for nearly 20 years, only recently has he felt comfortable discussing his gay life. And he's begun to create unqualified delights, such as the one even Michiko called “a completely charming entertainment: a small gem,” his novella The Clothes They Stood Up In, about a middle-aged married couple who return from the theatre to discover their flat has been robbed of absolutely everything, down to their last thumbtack and thimble. His hugely praised novella The Uncommon Reader, about the Queen's newfound love of literature thanks to a gay teenager, is a slender perfection. Since then he's published a memoir about his parents, A Life Like Other People's, and a pair of gay-inclusive tales in a short book wittily titled Smut [Kindle]. The same week that the British Library paid half a million pounds for Ted Hughes' papers, Bennett announced he is donating all his papers -- including decades of diaries and unpublished manuscripts -- to Oxford's Bodleian Library, in gratitude for his state scholarship. 

Jacobi, McKellen Get 'Vicious'

Poor you if you thought the gay comedy Vicious (debuting tonight on ITV) was going to serve actual queer viciousness. Predictably cozy, the sitcom about a gay couple who've been together 48 years may nevertheless elicit a laugh or two thanks to its stars.

Born April 25: Andy Bell

After co-founding and leaving Depeche Mode, after co-founding Yaz and leaving Alison Moyet, Vince Clarke advertised in Melody Maker for a singer for his new duo and plucked a gay meatpacker (literally) born in Dogsthorpe. With his high voice, high energy, and high style, Andy Bell put the disco in Erasure's discography: Who Needs Love Like That, Oh, L'amour, Sometimes, It Doesn't Have To Be, Victim of Love, Chains of Love, and A Little Respect, among many other singles that have, since 1985, propelled them to record sales of 25 million worldwide. Openly out while others cowered, Andy appeared on many gay charity albums like Red Hot + Blue, events like Red Hot + Dance, the True Colors Tour, the No H8 photo campaign, and he's headlining St Louis Pride in June. Though the Brit lives in Spain, the day of the US Supreme Court's DOMA hearing, he tweeted the video of A Little Respect. Middling interest in Erasure's recent albums of 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2011, have led to... a Christmas album coming in November. Andy is 49 today. His partner of 25+ years, Paul Hickey, died at 62 last April.

London Triptych by Jonathan Kemp

If Band of Thebes had a book club, the next selection would be Jonathan Kemp's novel London Triptych, finally out in North America after its debut wowed British readers way back in 2010. Like Michael Cunningham's triple-threaded riff on Virginia Woolf, London Triptych exists in three eras -- 1890s, 1950s, 1990s -- each echoing the experience of young hustlers and older gay clients, spinning out from the Oscar Wilde rent boy trial. The Hours won a Pulitzer and London Triptych won the Authors Club Prize (established in 1955), besting all its straight competition including the Whitbread/Costa winner for best first novel. Judge Joanne Harris, author of Chocolat, said Kemp's book has “astonishingly textured prose [and] wonderfully defined narrative voices.” The book was also shortlisted for the Green Carnation Prize and the Polari Book Prize. Clayton Littlewood called it "an amazing book. This is the best gay novel to be published in many years... It is literary fiction at its best." And the Times Literary Supplement praised Kemp's evocation of London, saying the city itself is as much a character as his three protagonists. Read it.

Women's Prize for Fiction Shortlist

Formerly the Orange Prize, the Women's Prize for Fiction has announced its shortlist:

• Kate Atkinson, Life After Life
• A.M. Homes, May We Be Forgiven
• Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior
• Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies
• Maria Semple, Where'd You Go, Bernadette
• Zadie Smith, NW

The winner will be announced June 5 in London.

Devon

This 1720 house from the Landmark Trust has the perfect fireplace and chairs to read by, should you find yourself celebrating your anniversary on a weekend of gale force winds and rain. We took a lesson from "our" sheep and, undaunted stubbornly, went as planned to Dartmoor (with wet wild horses) and to Mortehoe where we hiked the spectacular North Devon Coast Trail. To experience Britain's Southwest from home, read Mary Wesley's pansexual ensemble novel spanning sixty years The Camomile Lawn, Patrick Gale's gay family novel spanning thirty years Rough Music, or Jane Gardam's masterpiece spanning a lifetime in Hong Kong and Dorset, Old Filth. Sorry to report Gardam's brand new book, Last Friends, milking the success of Filth with an unneeded second sequel, is a bit of jumble. It's merely very good.

 

Blue London

 

For our 10th anniversary we're celebrating in London and renting a Landmark house in Devon. Gay's the Word bookshop is always an essential stop on any visit. Advance tickets to the V&A's Bowie exhibit are sold out through its end in August. The graffiti is from Exeter. And below is a minute reminder of Thatcher's feelings on "traditional moral values" vs. gay. 

Born April 4: Anthony Perkins, Graham Norton

A troubled teen coming of age in the 40s and 50s, Anthony Perkins escaped into acting. He told an interviewer, "There was nothing about me I wanted to be, but I felt happy being somebody else." Uncomfortably gay all his life, he had affairs with Nureyev, Sondheim, Tab Hunter, Christopher Makos, and a six-year relationship with choreographer Glover Dale. At 21 he got his first film role from George Cukor (The Actress written by Ruth Gordon) and he was 28 when Hitchcock cast him as Norman Bates in Psycho. A superstar terrified of being outed and unhappily typecast as a homicidal maniac, he fled to Europe where he worked with Ingrid Bergman in an adaptation of a Francoise Sagan novel and with Orson Welles in his rehash of Kafka's The Trial. Perkins was 39 before he finally had sex with a woman, his co-star Victoria Principal. When he was 41, he married Marisa Berenson's sister Berry on Cape Cod and they had two sons, named Oz and Elvis, though he continued to have sex with men. Having never been tested, he was horrified in 1990 to learn he was HIV+ from a headline in the National Enquirer, which had obtained a sample of his blood. Still closeted, he worked with aids charities, recorded an epilogue to And the Band Played On, and issued this statement, released upon his death from aids on September 12, 1992: "There are many who believe this disease is God's vengeance. But I believe it was sent to teach people how to love and understand and have compassion for each other. I have learned more about love, selflessness and human understanding from the people I have met in this great adventure in the world of aids than I ever did in the cutthroat, competitive world in which I spent my life." Returning from a vacation on Cape Cod on September 11, 2001, his wife died aboard AA flight 11. Their sons are an actor and a musician. Two biographies are Anthony Perkins: Split Image and Anthony Perkins: A Haunted Life.

Born Graham Walker in Bandon, County Cork, he popped over to London to train as a drama instructor but justly wound up on stage and in front of the camera. His success as an interviewer was instantaneous, like champagne uncorked. Effortlessly fun and engaging, he often outshines his guests. His childish delights ought to be embarrassing -- as he admits, "Now, this isn't big or clever," -- but those antics are often very, very funny, especially when he employs his best telephone manner. He called a sheriff's office in a Midwestern state about their law prohibiting intercourse with live fish, and, with Roseanne as his witness, rang up the Austrian tourist board to ask about visiting the north central village called Fucking. ("Is Fucking nice in winter?") It oughtn't be funny, but just try to remain stone-faced during his interview with speed daters. Frodo laughs so hard he kicks up his feet and rolls off the sofa. Norton's two books are a memoir, So Me, and greatest hits from his advice column, Ask Graham.

Bad Machinery by John Allison

Somewhere between a British Encyclopedia Brown and Archer for Kids is John Allison's West Yorskshire webcomic Bad Machinery Volume 1: The Case of the Team Spirit [Kindle], out today in book form. Like Dickens, like JK Rowling, the Manchester geek has a brilliant knack for names: In his fictional town of Tackleford, at Griswald Grammar, two rival groups of students solve local mysteries. The girls' group, with Shauna Wickle and Charlotte Grote, compete against a trio of boys including Jack Finch and Sonny Craven, whom some readers are convinced is gay. Mixed in with the sleuthing are the more unsolvable challenges of first dates, family ties, and frenemies. Through it all, his bright drawings and dialogue are a delight.

Today was supposed to be the delayed released of another quirky Brit's book of cartoons, You're All Just Jealous of My Jetpack by Tom Gauld, but it's been postponed another two weeks.

(The photo, via, is not to be construed as anti-superhero. John was very concerned about that.)

New Radio Interviews: Alan Bennett, Colm Tóibín, Hilary Mantel, Anne Tyler

   

Colm Tóibín visits the Guardian book club to discuss The Testament of Mary. He reads for seven minutes then discusses the novel with the host and answers audience questions for the remainder of the half hour. Straight away he reveals the two unnamed men in the story are John and (impossibly) Paul (who is "mean"). Listen here.

BBC Radio 4's Front Row interviews Alan Bennett on his recent plays and those two stories in Smut.

Readers may also be interested in a recent chat with Hilary Mantel on her two Booker winners, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies.

On Friday, Front Row broadcast thirty minutes at home in Baltimore with the peerless Anne Tyler on her nineteen previous books and her work-in-progress, a big novel to be told going backwards through three or four generations, called A Spool of Blue Thread.

Born March 28: Håkan Lindquist, Dirk Bogarde

Is it the mild gay content that prevents the international literary community from adding Håkan Lindquist to the working list of great living Nothernish writers like Gerbrand Bakker, Peter Stamm and Per Petterson (all of them indebted to the magnificent simplicity of lesbian Tove Jansson)? Or is it merely because only two of Håkan's five novels are available in English, and those two were long-distance efforts from a German publisher? Rest assured, his time will come. Until then, you can pride yourself on getting to know this dashing Swede (who splits his time between Stockholm and Berlin) before IMPAC Dublin discovers him. His short, domestic novels tackle eternal themes of family secrets, the nature of love, and the passage of time, with a fresh perspective and a modern, gay naturalism. My Brother and His Brother follows Jonas as he tracks down and uncovers surprising details about Paul, his older brother who died at sixteen the year before Jonas was born. On Collecting Stamps is a beautiful look back, from middle age, as Mattias reconsiders his unconventional friendship, starting at twelve, with a lonely middle-aged stamp collector, Samuel. Notice in both cases the complex double layering of time: At eighteen, Jonas is now older than his "older" brother, and Mattias has reached the same stage of life Samuel was when they met. Brilliant. Read him. (Photo by Yuna Yagi.)

After distinguished service as an intelligence officer in the Queen's Royal Regiment during WWII, Dirk Bogarde tried acting and became Britain's top box office draw of the 1950s. So it was big news in 1961 when he chose to play a closeted, married gay barrister in Victim, especially considering he was closeted himself. (He and his manager Anthony Forwood lived together for decades.) In 1963, Bogarde played the creepy, closety valet in The Servant, and later played the tragic gay lead of Death in Venice. Today, the courage of these choices can hardly be imagined. Even in 1971, two years after Midnight Cowboy, Warner Brothers was so terrified of Death in Venice being charged with obscenity in the U.S. they wanted to drop the movie altogether. They relented after Queen Elizabeth and Princess Anne attended the London premiere; it won an Oscar. Yet offscreen in his own life, Bogarde lacked the same bravery. After the anguish of watching his partner suffer a prolonged battle with Parkinson's and liver cancer, he became a vocal proponent of euthanasia. That was 1988, coincidentally the same year that John Gielgud came out quietly and Ian McKellan came out blazingly. Bogarde never did. He retired in 1990 and lived till 1999, by which time he had written something like eight volumes of autobiography, none of which tells the full truth of his life. In fact, he destroyed much of his personal archives.

Born March 27: Denton Welch

Even if you weren't part of the Shanghai scene in the 1920s, you'll feel like you're remembering and reliving it as you sink into the splendor of Denton Welch's fictionalized memoir Maiden Voyage. Born in China to English parents, the young aesthete Welch collected art objects as a child and intended to be a painter before, at twenty, a car struck him while he was cycling in Surrey and rendered him unfit for anything but the writing life. The injury and its complications left him in pain until his death at 33. (He did manage to paint this self-portrait, which hangs in the National Gallery London.) His short novel In Youth Is Pleasure is essential reading, and a close second is A Voice Through a Cloud. Spoiler alert: Nothing happens. Artistic, sensitive Orvil Pym copes with athletic, bullying older brothers and spends his fifteenth summer, um, having feelings? Noticing things? Against all logic he makes it absolutely compelling.

As proof of Welch's alchemist talents to transform empty days into gold, here's William S Burroughs, who often cited Welch as his "greatest literary influence," explaining, "Whenever a student tells me he has nothing to write about I refer him to Denton Welch. He makes the reader aware of the magic that is right under his eyes..." That magic is evident everywhere in Welch's collected stories; Bob Smith said "At Thirteen" was his all-time favorite short fiction by a gay author. Long ago when Peter Cameron inscribed my copy of Andorra he wrote, "Read Denton Welch." One of the ten thousand enduring charms of Peter's marvelous novel Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You [Kindle] is his teen protagonist's love of Welch's work.

Junot Díaz Wins World's Richest Story Prize for Tale of Underage Sex

Pulitzer winner, NBCC winner, MacArthur genius, MIT professor Junot Díaz has won the Sunday Times Short Story Prize -- at £30,000 the world's richest award for a single story -- for "Miss Lora," included in his National Book Award finalist This Is How You Lose Her [Kindle]. He makes an interesting point about the double standard on underage sex. Readers here can probably think of another younger - older dynamic that people "aren't celebrating."

Díaz told the Guardian:

"We tend, as a culture, to think of boys having underage sex quite differently to how we think of girls. I find that quite disturbing, and wanted to question the logic of that," he said. "If a boy has sex with his teacher, people under their breath are kind of high-fiving the kid. If a 16- or 15-year-old girl has sex with an older teacher – forget about it. No one's celebrating. That seemed really strange." 

Díaz said he grew up "with so many young men who had experiences when they were teenagers with older women", and was interested in writing about the issue. "The silence around it is pretty enormous," he said. "I think it is a conversation we need to continue to have."

One of the judges called the story an "instant classic." It appeared in The New Yorker last April.

The other finalists were: Mark Haddon's The Gun; Sarah Hall's Evie; Cynan Jones' The Dig; Toby Litt's Call It 'The Bug' Because I Have No Time to Think of a Better Title; and Ali Smith's The Beholder.

Born March 16: Sybille Bedford

How close did the exquisite writer Sybille Bedford come to being killed by the Nazis? Born in 1911 outside Berlin and raised a Roman Catholic, she lived with her aged father, Baron Maximilian Josef von Schoenebeck, when her mother, his second wife, Elizabeth Bernard, Anglo-German Jewish, rich, and beautiful, was off with another man. At 22 Sybille blasted the Nazis in an essay for Klaus Mann's literary journal and they subsequently discovered her heritage and seized her bank accounts. She couldn't renew her German passport and couldn't stay abroad once it had expired, and without an income. That could
have led to the end. Enter Aldous Huxley's wife Maria who knew gay Auden had just gallantly wed Erika Mann to solve her citizenship problems. Said Maria, “We must get one of our bugger friends to marry Sybille.” They didn't need to look far; Auden's butler had been having an affair with an English army officer Terry Bedford, who agreed to be used. Now a British citizen, Sybille spent the war in America with the Huxleys and wrote three unpublishable novels imitating Aldous' style. After the war, she traveled to Mexico, found her exceptional voice, and wrote her legendary A Visit to Don Otavio. An absolute must read. Bruce Chatwin said of another book, “When the history of modern prose in English comes to be written, Mrs. Bedford will have to appear in any list of its most dazzling practitioners.” Bedford became friends with another wanderlust writer, Martha Gellhorn, and lovers with Eda Lord. She spent the 1950s to 70s loosely based in France, Italy, Britain, and Portugal.

She also wrote four novels, one of which was a Booker nominee. The best is A Legacy, covering two Austrian-German families leading up to WWI. The queerest is A Compass Error, about a teenage girl's affair with a married woman. The most commericial is Jigsaw, again mining her formative years for a story about a girl shuttled between her unconventional mother in Italy and her father's uptight family in England. In her 90s she finally wrote her memoir, Quicksands, which nearly as obliquely covers a lot of the same ground as her autobiographical novels, including her lesbian relationships. V. S. Pritchett praised her mind as “radiant.” The finest essay about her is Joan Acocella's appreciation in the New Yorker. Bedford could be blunt; in that spirit, you're a bloody fool to skip her work.

Tracey Thorn's Bedsit Disco Queen

Everything But the Girl, the gay man's motto. And, for a while, every queer's favorite British duo. Lead singer Tracey Thorn's memoir Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to Be a Pop Star is out today from Virago:

"A frank and funny pop culture memoir in the vein of Caitlin Moran's How to be a Woman, this is "how to be a woman artist"

Tracey Thorn, one half of the internationally successful group Everything But the Girl, collaborator with such artists as Paul Weller, Massive Attack, and dance legend Todd Terry, was only 16 when she bought an electric guitar and joined a band. A year later, she formed an all-girl band called the Marine Girls, played gigs, signed to an indie label, and started releasing records. Then, for 18 years, between 1982 and 2000, she was one half of Everything But the Girl. They released nine albums and sold nine million records, went on countless tours, had hits and flops, and were reviewed and interviewed to within an inch of their lives. Tracey has been in the charts, out of them, back in. She's seen herself described as an indie darling, a middle-of-the-road nobody, and a disco diva. As she explains here, she hasn't always fit in, a fact that's helped her to face up to the realities of a pop career. She discusses her realizations—that there are thrills and wonders to be experienced, but also moments of doubt, mistakes, and violent lifestyle changes from luxury to squalor and back again, sometimes within minutes. This is the funny, perceptive, and candid story of her 30-year pop career."

Mikey Walsh's Gay Gypsy Boy Story Continues ...On the Run

Continuing the story of his surprise #1 hit of growing up gay in Britain's Romany community, Gypsy Boy, today is the overdue US release of Mikey Walsh's Gypsy Boy on the Run: My Escape from a Life Among the Romany Gypsies [Kindle]. Of the original, Stephen Fry said, "It was a revelation. Moving, terrifying, funny and brilliant. I shall never forget it - an amazing achievement."

Kirkus calls this sequel, "a great-hearted book of tenderness and brutality." The editor of Grazia magazine raves, 'Funny, touching and heartbreaking in equal measures, Gypsy Boy on the Run is a coming-of-age tale like no other. Mikey Walsh's writing is fresh, raw and utterly compelling." Gary Barlow says it's "as uplifting as it is brutal." A major thread of the new memoir's plot is his struggle with and eventual acceptance of being gay. Despite volcanic initial opposition to Mikey's sexuality, the new book is dedicated to his father.

Gay Trouble Then and Now in "The Child's Child"

Winner of three Edgars, and Silver, Gold, and Diamond Dagger Awards--and longtime patron saint to Jeanette Winterson, including lending her a cottage where she wrote The Passion--Ruth Rendell has featured lgbt characters in some of her more than 70 books. Her 1986 Gold Dagger Award winner Live Flesh was the basis for Almodovar's 1997 movie Carne Trémula. Suspense master Claude Chabrol has directed two movies from her work, most notably the intense little powderkeg La Cérémonie based on A Judgement in Stone. 

Rendell, now 83, publishes her more psychological novels under the name Barbara Vine, and the fourteenth of these is The Child's Child. If the title vaguely suggests Hollinghurst, so might the century-spanning time frame and the plight of gay men then and now. In the present, Grace and Andrew Easton inherit their grandmother's house and share it happily until Andrew's strident boyfriend James moves in. Outside a gay club, the men witness their friend's murder in a gay bashing and James begins to unravel. Into this story comes a 1951 novella about the 1920s, The Child's Child: John Goodwin moves to the country to avoid London's gay temptations, and enters a sham marriage to give cover to his 15 year-old, pregnant, unwed sister's unborn child. Of course, even in Devon, John is tempted again... and becomes entangled with a hot, cruel hustler who torments him in the worst way.