Band of Thebes

So Far, 2011 Movie Attendance Down 22% From Last Year

Echoing the decline in book sales in 2010, U.S. movie box office revenue so far in 2011 is down 21% compared to last year and attendance is off by 22%. The Los Angeles Times reports this freefall without mentioning that the economy is still awful for millions of Americans and the movies Hollywood is inflicting on them are even worse. (Or the movies are wonderful and play in one theater for two weeks.) The suits are hoping Rango and Battle L.A. will turn the slump around. Literary types can anticipate another Jane Eyre opening a week from Friday, starring Mia W from The Kids Are All Right and Michael Fassbender as Mr. Rochester, with the bonus of Jamie Bell and Judi Dench in supporting roles. The movie I'm most looking forward to is Francois Ozon's Potiche.

Obama Admin Fails To Get Veto Power over Domain Suffixes Like .gay

In the worst kind of government overreaching, the Obama administration earlier this month asked ICANN for new requirements that would allow governments to reject proposed new web suffixes "for any reason." The U.S. sought mandatory review of new domain suffixes by an ICANN advisory panel of representatives from 100 nations. These draconian measures were prompted by a current application from Scott Seitz, a bicoastal businessman seeking to create .gay. (Seven years ago the Bush administration sidelined the .xxx suffix.) Today Cnet reports from ICANN that a group of nations has rejected the Obama proposal, deciding instead that nations may offer "nonbiding advice" about domain suffixes.

Excerpt from Sigrid Nunez's Sontag Memoir *Sempre* Susan

Lucky us. The Times' T magazine today runs a meaty essay adapted from Sigrid Nunez's soon to be released memoir about her time working for Susan Sontag, dating her son, and living with both of them. I would enjoy the subject and Nunez's insights regardless, but I'm happy to see she twice reference's Sontag's bisexuality. One passage:

"It wasn’t enough that she had spent the evening out with friends. When she came home, though it was late, though David and I might be already in bed, she would knock. “May I come in?” (The shyness in her voice through that closed door was heartbreaking.) David and I slept on a mattress on the floor. A small sofa stood near it. She would settle on the sofa, light a cigarette and begin telling us about her evening. I sometimes fell asleep while she was still talking.

"But in fact, there had probably never been a time in her life when she feared being alone as much as she did then. Not only had she been diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer; she was also slowly breaking up with the woman who’d been her companion for many years. She made no attempt to hide how devastating it would be for her if David were to move out. But she always insisted that it was not primarily neediness but rather love that made her want to keep her son with her forever. Theirs had never been an ordinary mother-son relationship, she said. In fact, she told me she had never really wanted David to think of her as his mother. “I’d rather he see me as — oh, I don’t know — his goofy big sister.” (“More like my brother” and “my best friend” was how she said she usually thought of him.) After all, she had been just 19 when he was born."

Let's hope the full book has time to go deeper into her lesbian relationships. Edmund White says Nunez's 140-page memoir is "the best thing written about Sontag." (I particularly admired the Sontag sections of his City Boy.) Online retailers say Sempre Susan will be released March 22.

"Kids" Wins Only Screenplay at Independent Spirit Awards

The fake lesbian movie (to titillate straight men) beat the real lesbian film (illuminating queer families) last night at the Independent Spirt Awards as Lisa Choldenko and Stuart Blumberg won best screenplay for The Kids Are All Right while Black Swan took best feature, best director, and best actress. Short story author James Franco won best actor for 127 Hours. Get Low won best first feature. The awards do not honor supporting actors post supporting actors winners (both from the Ozarks family meth drama Winter's Bone) with the major acting awards at the top of their website, and they do not honor editing, costumes, or music. Best documentary was Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop.

Obama Orders Justice To Oppose DOMA in Court

Best flip-flop ever. After two years of defending the noxious Defense of Marriage Act in federal courts, Obama today ordered the Department of Justice to begin opposing the 1996 law that bars federal recognition of same-sex marriages. The NYT reports:

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. sent a letter to Congress on Wednesday saying that the Justice Department will now take the position in court that the act should be struck down as a violation of same-sex couples’ rights to equal protection under the law.

“The president and I have concluded that classifications based on sexual orientation warrant heightened scrutiny and that, as applied to same-sex couples legally married under state law,” a crucial provision of the act is unconstitutional, Mr. Holder wrote.

The Times continues:

While Mr. Obama has long argued that the Defense of Marriage Act is bad policy and has urged Congress to repeal it, his administration has also sent Justice Department lawyers into court to defend the statute’s constitutionality.

The new position will require the administration to file new briefs in such litigation, including a major case now pending before the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, in Boston.

Congress may decide to appoint its own lawyers to defend the law, or outside groups may try to intervene in the cases in order to mount legal arguments in the law’s defense. Mr. Holder said that the administration would continue to enforce the act unless and until Congress repeals it, or a court delivers a “definitive verdict against the law’s constitutionality.”

Dianne Feinstein issued a statement promising to introduce legislation to repeal DOMA. Predictably, Republicans are lashing out against the move toward equality.

Pelican Wednesday

Obvs, tarpon are having a convention here this week. So it must be tarp-con?

Two Vancouver Schools Flashmob Against Bullying

In Vancouver, the kids at an elementary school and a secondary school pulled on the pink and pulled off a giant flashmob to dance their way to acceptance... acceptance of you, gay viewers!

'The More I Owe You' a Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist

The lesbian love story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares, The More I Owe You [[Kindle]] by Michael Sledge is among this year's nominees for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize's first fiction award. LGBT writers are noticeably absent from the fiction category (Franzen, Egan, Bass, Bausch, Reiken) and shockingly ignored in biography: Duplicating those pesky NBCC noms (also Franzen, Egan), there's no Secret Historian, and once again Selina Hasting's The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham [[Kindle]] takes the spot that really ought to be Wendy Moffat's A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster [[Kindle]]. Winners will be announced April 29.

Tarpon Tuesday

In the Keys this week. Still need to read Karen Russell's debut novel Swamplandia! [[Kindle]] about 12 year-old Ava Bigtree, who, like all her family, wrestles alligators at their shabby Everglades tourist attraction... until she embarks on an improbable journey through the mangroves in search of her lost sister. Russell is one of the National Book Award Foundations' "5 Under 35," a New Yorker "20 Under 40," and has three times appeared in the Best American Short Stories series. She is 29.

(Did you remember that the scientific name for tarpon is the totally fake sounding Megalops? Extra fertile Mrs. Megalops can lay 12 million eggs at once.)

Born February 22: Christopher Bram

Everything you really need to know about the wonderful novelist Christopher Bram, you can learn from his nonfiction collection, Mapping the Territory. It's not a memoir but what better insights into a writer's character do you need than essays like "A Body in Books" which reveals the "thirteen reading experiences that helped to make me who I am," and the title piece, which maps the state of gay fiction? The book also features more traditional essays about his grappling with sex at William & Mary or loving his Perry Street front steps. Beyond that, you must immerse yourself in his nine novels. Like Peter Carey, Bram can nimbly, vividly leap in and out of centuries, locations, and characters. His most recent, Exiles in America, is a quartet between a middle aged gay couple in Virginia, an Iranian artist, and his Russian wife. His most encompassing, The Notorious Dr. August: His Real Life and Crimes, begins in the Civil War and traces its interracial couple from fourteen well into adulthood through New York City, Europe, and Istanbul. His most relentless, Gossip, tracks a gay East Villager through a nightmare of the DC political closet, media hypocrisy, and murder. His most humorous, Lives of the Circus Animals, studies the species known as "theater people." His most famous, Gods and Monsters, about director James Whale, his housekeeper, and his ex-marine gardener in 1957, is even better than the Oscar winning movie. He has finished his group biography, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America which Twelve will publish in February 2012. He lives in New York with his longtime partner photograpger and filmmaker Draper Shreve.

Most Borrowed from UK Libraries: Waters, Ebershoff, Cornwell, O'Grady

The good news, despite UK austerity cuts abolishing the body that governs the Public Lending Right, author royalties for library books are still being paid at the rate of 6.25 pence per loan up to £6,600 annually per author. The bad news is the newly-released list of the 250 most borrowed titles from mid-2009 to mid-2010 is a wasteland of violence and cliche, too much of it imported from America. Again this period James Patterson was the most borrowed author, more than two million times. The entire top ten were stories of violence or crime as were nearly 66% of the list. A handful of LGBT writers brighten the straight commercial monotony: The highest queers are Sarah Waters at #15 with The Little Stranger, and surprisingly David Ebershoff's The 19th Wife at #45, along with Tom Rob Smith, Maurice Sendak, and prolific Patricia Cornwell who has six titles ranked between #48 and #175. Overall the most borrowed non-fiction title was gay comedian Paul O'Grady's At My Mother's Knee co-authored with his drag persona Lily Savage.

The few literary books to make the list were by Hilary Mantel, Sebastian Barry, Sebastian Faulks, Aravind Adiga, and Nick Hornby. Less literary but more funny, Dawn French ranked #225 with Dear Fatty.

A true visionary needs to institute a similar program in the U.S.

Berlin Teddys: Ausente, Tomboy, Barbara Hammer, Genesis P-Orridge

Juries announced the winners of the 25th annual Teddy Awards for queer films at the Berlin Film Festival, with the top prize for Argentine writer-director Marco Berger's Ausente. This best feature winner tells the unsettling story of a swimming student in hormonal overdrive determined to "ensnare his presumably straight coach into an illicit liaison;" problems ensue. A disappointed Variety critic mocked the Bernard Herrmannesque score and said the movie had "nowhere to go."

Célinne Sciamma won the jury prize for her feature Tomboy about Laure, an androgynous 10 year-old girl who lets another girl Lisa believe she's a boy. 

Longtime visionary filmmaker Barbara Hammer, 70, won two prizes in the category for best short film, one for her own Maya Deren's Sink (which "explores Deren's concepts of space, time and form through visits and projections filmed in her LA and NY homes") and the other for Generations which Hammer shares with co-director Gina Carducci for "a 30-minute 16mm film about mentoring and passing on the tradition of personal experimental filmmaking." 

Marie Losier's The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye won best documentary which gives viewers "insight into their personal gender-concept of “pandrogyny” and the beginnings of British industrial-music."

In honor of the award's 25th anniversary, Pierre et Gilles created this poster. It gets bigger.

The Sons of Tennessee Williams by Tim Wolfe

  

Last night WYES-TV aired Tim Wolfe's 75-minute documentary "The Sons of Tennessee Williams," about the first gay krewes in mardi gras. Seven or ten years before Stonewall, these men created a safe space for gay social clubs during a period of intense vice squad crackdowns on their bars. Over time their organizations would become powerful political forces for recognition and equality in New Orleans. Wolfe spent 18 years on the project. A 9:44 version of the trailer can be seen here.

Gay Author Perry Moore, 39, Found Dead in His Apartment

Lammy winning author of the gay YA novel Hero, Perry Moore, 39, was found unconscious on his bathroom floor yesterday and pronounced dead at the scene on West Houston St. According to the New York Daily News, "The exact cause of death has not been determined, but sources said it appeared to be an overdose of OxyContin." 

Moore and his longtime partner Hunter Hill were filmmakers, having written and directed Lake City starring Sissy Spacek, Rebecca Romijn, and Dave Matthews. The couple were also producers on the Spike Jonze documentary about gay children's book author Maurice Sendak, Tell Them Anything You Want. In addition, Moore was an executive producer of the Narnia films.

Hero is about Thom Creed, who comes to terms with being gay while also discovering his superpowers. School Library Journal said, the YA novel "becomes a real page-turner that is worth the wait."

More Than 100 Photos of Black Male Couples from the 1860s Onward

 

Photo collector and amateur historian Trent Kelley has amassed 114 images of black male couples from the past 150 years. The pictures are revelatory, more powerful than descriptive writing's attempts to convince readers that black men have loved each other forever. (It is also heartening to see so many images of black dandies, as our national purveyor of pictures, Hollywood, believes every black man before WWII was a hulking sharecropper who had just removed his shirt.) Not all of the portraits depict gay couples; some appear to be family shots or simply friends. But dozens of these remarkable discoveries undeniably capture romantic love. Congratulations to Trent Kelley for rescuing relationships that rank among the most erased in American history.

No More Down Low.tv interviewed Kelley via Skype. Watch the preview below or see the entire 19-minute episode of their web program here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Born February 18: Audre Lorde, Duane Michals

Born to Caribbean immigrants in Harlem, Audrey Lorde recognized the power of names and naming early in life, changing hers as a child to Audre to highlight the symmetry of both names ending in e. At 49 her landmark Zami: A New Spelling of My Name confirmed her stature as a great and essential writer and the nation's foremost "black lesbian feminist poet warrior." Still in her twenties, through a year at the National University of Mexico, graduating from Hunter, and getting her advanced degree from Columbia, she began publishing her poems and seeing them anthologized abroad as well as in Langston Hughes' New Negro Poets USA. (In 1997 Norton published her definitive Collected Poems at 512 pages.) A mother of two children from an eight year marriage to attorney Edwin Rollins, she was already enjoying her lesbianism at twenty, during a year at the National University of Mexico, and later had a seventeen year relationship with psychology professor Frances Clayton, as well as shorter relationships with the artist Mildred Thomson and finally with Gloria Joseph. That Clayton is white might be noteworthy because it was during those years, co-mothering the two children, that Lorde attacked the underlying racism of the feminist movement, linking the experience to slavery in essays like "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House." Lorde had equally strong insights into the lgbt movement. From a 1980 interview reprinted in the new book I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde:

"...most gay white men are marginal only in one respect. Much of the gay white movement seeks to be included in the american dream and is angered when they do not receive the standard white male privileges, misnamed as 'american democracy.'

    Often, white gay men are working not to change the system. This is one of the reasons why the gay male movement is as white as it is. Black gay men recognize, again by the facts of survival, that being Black, they are not going to be included in the same way...

    I see no essential battle between many gay men and the white male establishment. To be sure, there are gay men who do not view their oppression as isolated, and who work for a future. But it is a matter of majority politics: many gay white males are being pulled by the same strings as other white men in this society. You do not get people to work against what they have identified as their basic self-interest."

After fighting cancer for fourteen years, Lorde died in 1992 in St. Croix at 58. Jackie Kay is one of many who call Lorde "my hero."

Even if you've somehow missed everything else, you know the self-taught photographer Duane Michals, who turns 78 today, for his cover art on the Police's album Synchronicity. Hallmarks of his black and white work are his use of handwritten text, nude men, dramatic juxtapositions, artificial stagings, and nods to gay history -- the horse image is from his 1970 Salute to Walt Whitman and was sold five years ago at a Christie's auction of Elton John's art. Among his more recent books is The Adventures of Constantine Cavafy. Awesomely, Michals and his partner, an architect he met at the gym in 1960, this year will celebrate 51 years together. Old school to the core, Michals is dismayed by "all these kids spewing out of art school photographing their dinner and then making it a 20-foot photograph," and he is not a supporter of gay marriage. From a 2008 interview:

So, you're politically against gay marriage, or just spiritually against it?

"I'm politically against it. I want civil unions. I want all the political advantages, but marriage is a tired vestige of the heterosexual world. I don't know why gay people would want to get married. Of all things! It's a failed institution. It just doesn't make sense. Wedding cake? Oh please!"

Colm Tóibín Reads The Empty Family

Colm Tóibín has a lovely, rich, expressive voice but the best part of his readings are his tutorial answers to even the simplest questions. Last night at 192 Books in Chelsea when a fan said, Your work seems sorta like introspective or something? he replied, That's the history of the novel, isn't it? And immediately launched into a recap of Henry James' introduction to The Portrait of a Lady saying the chapter in which Isabel Archer sits alone by the fireplace is the best in the book, that his entire novel depends on that scene. Without pausing Tóibín said it is the moments when you see Jane Austen's characters alone that makes you care for them, and that you realize her characters that do not have the capacity for solitude are "ridiculous." He told a droll story that when he started publishing novels some people who knew him said, in effect, You're always having a laugh and looking for the next party but my god your books are so dull and quiet and slow and introspective.

Cynthia Dunn asked his opinion of the movie The Blackwater Lightship and he told hilarious tales of staring so intensely at Dianne Wiest and Angela Lansbury as they became his characters or said lines his dead mother used to say that he was barred from the set. Not so his 19 year-old nephew and friend who were runners for the starring ladies and ADORED Dianne Wiest, regaling him nightly with what she had said to them in her "glamorous American accent." 

Speaking about the title story, which he read, he claimed he couldn't write poetry but he wanted to do a story that was about the rhythm of the language. He said you had to feel your way, breaking all those writing class rules. He liked the sound of the word telescope and repeating it might give it meaning, but you had to know that you could use the word ten times and not twelve. He also said he wrote it quickly, while teaching at Stanford, then spent a year going through it removing everything non-essential.

Among the rapt, overflow crowd which included a crush of standing room and people sitting on the floor, were writers Fran Lebowitz and Bob Smith. I also ran into an astute reader who prefers Tóibín's previous collection Mothers and Sons to The Empty Family.

Tóibín reads again tonight at Book Court in Brooklyn; tomorrow night at the Jim Rouse Theatre in Columbia, Maryland; February 22 at Labyrinth Books in Princeton; and on March 3 at the B&N on Broadway & 82nd.

Born February 15-17: Bill T. Jones, Robert Dessaix

The cruel vagaries of aids: In 1984, both Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, professional partners running their jointly named dance troupe and boyfriends for thirteen years, since college at SUNY Binghamton, were diagnosed with HIV. Zane died in 1988; last June, after twenty-six years of being HIV+, Jones added another Tony Award (for the smash hit Fela!, which he co-created, directed, and choreographed) to his many, many honors including a MacArthur "Genius" Award in 1994 and a Kennedy Center Honor in 2010. His more than one hundred maverick dance pieces, which frequently incorporate same-sex attraction, eroticism, anger, and nudity, have been seen worldwide and he often collaborates with the era's leading artists, from Toni Morrison and Max Roach on Degga to Jessye Norman for How! Do! We! Do! Confronting the perceived death sentence of aids, he traveled the country interviewing many kinds of terminally ill patients before creating his celebration of living, Still/Here, which many have loved and some have hated, like the New Yorker's former dance critic Arlene Croce, who refused to see "victim art." In 1995, Jones published his autobiography Last Night on Earth, happily misnamed. (photo: Lois Greenfield)

 

Which book finally dislodged The Horse Whisperer from the #1 spot on Australia's bestseller lists? Basically its opposite: Robert Dessaix's Night Letters was a surprise sensation, an intellectual novel compromised of twenty letters written in a hotel in Venice in the mid-1990s by an Australian man newly diagnosed with HIV. Echoing literary travelers from Marco Polo and Dante to Casanova and Sterne, contemplating life, death, love, and the passage of time, the narrator R. discourses on cathedrals and museums, seduction and sex, hell and heaven, Venice and Venetians. Despite the character's dire future, critics hailed his "wry, chatty, surprisingly cheerful voice" (NYTBR) finding him "seductive, charming, and always thought-provoking" (Kirkus). The San Francisco Chronicle called it a "luminous gem" and the Cleveland Plain Dealer "a story exquisitely told." Dessaix's second novel, Corfu, also describes gay ex-pats in Europe and again rings with literary echoes: Homer, Sappho, Chekhov, Cavafy. His nonfiction includes a memoir called A Mother's Disgrace about his own adoption and subsequent wanderlust; Twilight of Love, a book about retracing Turgenev's steps as he followed a married opera star and her husband for years; and an anthology, Australian Gay and Lesbian Writing. Last April he published On Humbug. After a failed marriage to a woman, Dessaix wrote a personal ad in 1982 and met Peter Timms, who is still his partner. As for longevity and dedication, Dessaix created a complex language when he was eleven and continues to speak it to himself even now, as he turns 67 today.

Hardcover Sales Down 5% for Year; Bankrupt Borders Kills 200 Stores

Numbers released today by the AAP show that industrywide, adult hardcover book sales in 2010 were down 5.1% from the year before. Adult paperback sales fell 2% and mass market paperbacks were off by 6.3%. Children's/YA sales declined 9.5% for hardcovers and paperbacks were down 5.7%.

Sales of e-books rose 164% for the year, representing 8.3% of the trade market, up from 3.2% in 2009.

As expected, Borders today filed for bankruptcy and announced the closing of 200 stores, roughly 30% of their chain. The company has debt of $1.29 billion and claims total assets of $1.28 billion.

The store closings cover the country from Anchorage, Alaska to Mayaguez, Puerto Rico. Hardest hit is California, which will see 35 stores close, including 11 around Los Angeles and 12 in the greater Bay Area. Tampa will see 4 stores shut down, Austin is losing 3 as is Manhattan (Park & 57th, Kips Bay, and lower Broadway), DC has 2 stores closing, including the one closest to Dupont Circle. A stingy database that displays only one state at a time can be found here.

Anecdotally I'll say in the past two weeks I've been on 7 airplanes, 3 ferries, several beaches, and 2 long train rides: People are reading books though not as much as they used to. Traditionally, on a trip a book was the most portable entertainment to stave off boredom. Now, when every airplane seatback has its own video screen, when every airport lounge blasts CNN or FOX or BBC, when people are watching movies or playing games or listening to music -- or reading -- on their laptops and on their phones, when travelers have cell service in the middle of the Gulf of Thailand, books face tremendous competition. The nature of how people amuse themselves is ever changing.

Was a better picture when the blue t-shirt by the window was texting on that iPhone.

Best of 2011: The Empty Family by Colm Tóibín

Colm Tóibín's The Empty Family [[Kindle]] ranks with a handful of books (by Alice Munro, William Trevor, Bobbie Ann Mason, Tatyana Tolstaya, Mavis Gallant, Julie Hecht, Annie Proulx, and Raymond Carver) as one of the great story collections of the past quarter century. His stories are larger and recent high praise is insufficient for the power they achieve.

Often, the stories easily inhabit three settings. Always, the present moment is balanced by the weight of the past. A trio of themes -- loss, solitude, dislocation -- yield infinite brilliance. In a mere fifteen pages “One Minus One” covers Texas, New York, and Dublin; the narrator’s failed relationship with the man he’s addressing; and a lifetime of family strain resurfacing as his mother dies. My favorite, “Two Women,” conveys Dublin, Los Angeles, and Guatemala as a wonderfully brusque set dresser Frances Rossiter reluctantly returns to her native Ireland to work on a movie.

“The lowness of the buildings in Dublin, shops that were cheap imitations of larger and better shops in bigger cities, ways of dressing that were either shabby or pretentious, and ways of moving in the street that lacked alertness or any style, all began to irritate her. At the weekend, especially on Fridays, the hotel lobby and the bars filled up with drinkers, and once or twice, having pushed her way through a crowd of half-drunken men and women, she was proud of having lived most of her life away from such people and glad that the staff of the hotel, unfailingly polite and self-effacing, came from elsewhere.
        It struck her that she really would not come back, that she would work in future anywhere but here. Even Gabi’s efficiency and sweetness seemed complacent to her, and some of the men moving sets were too slow, almost openly lazy. She found it difficult, especially in the third and fourth weeks of filming, not to show her impatience. She loved intelligent, decisive people who did things briskly, and on a few occasions when she had to phone home and found herself speaking down the line to Rosario, she realized how much she missed Rosario’s intelligence, almost exquisite at times in its depth of perception, and her way of moving, so elegant and careful and poised.”

The nature of artifice is Frances’s life’s work – notice how she views even the real Dublin shops as “imitations” – and one sees how she's become its master:

“The director used to be young – she smiled at the thought as she opened the set drawings she had carried with her – but now he was no longer young. But he was not old enough to know that you got nothing extra from using a real pub, no matter how quaint and full of atmosphere, instead of a studio-built pub. A set, she knew, just needed a few spare props that suggested something; with a real pub, you would have to spend hours removing objects that suggested too much, and painting over colours that seemed faded to the eye but would jar once bright lights and a camera were shone on them.”

The story’s interest in the art of artifice expands, incorporating paintings at the National Gallery and how a movement by a guard there recalls the dead Irish actor (artifice personified) with whom she had a very long affair, the core romance of her life. Ultimately, a chance encounter on set in the burdensome pub penetrates Frances’s own carefully constructed facade, right down to her speech, which reverts to the softer, Irish cadences of her youth.

All the other stories are equally engaging, and their meticulous subtleties and intricate craft arrive almost hidden by compelling characers and compulsive plots. “The New Spain” unspools layers of ironies as Carme, a former radical communist who frittered away years of exile in London, returns to Barcelona then Menorca with drastically different standing in her uptight family now that she’s inherited half of her grandmother’s property. The novella “The Street” explores the loving, neutral, or brutal hierarchies among Pakistani immigrants in Barcelona, where one character is wholly dependent physically and financially on his attacker.

Gay relationships are the core concern of five or six of the stories. Francine Prose considers the best in the collection to be “The Pearl Fishers” about a gay man’s meal with a bourgeois couple, reuniting him with his first lover from boarding school and that man’s wife who is gaining fame as a crusader against past abuse. Readers of Brooklyn’s detailed hetero sex scenes who thought Tóibín would never be so explicit with his gay characters will especially appreciate those teenage flashbacks as well as the many male couplings and orgy in “Barcelona, 1975.” Returning to more oblique times, the first story, “Silence,” sees the author of The Master again imagine Henry James as a character, now through the eyes of his widowed dinner partner, who carefully recasts her passionate adultery as a story idea for him. Again the source of art and the urge to remake the past propel this collection to astonishing heights.