Band of Thebes

Evie Wyld's All the Birds, Singing

Sensing a winner, last year I imported Evie Wyld's second novel All the Birds, Singing [and Kindle] from England. I was hoping for an Australian Miriam Toews and I did love same quality of careful attention to isolated places and remote people: a young woman named Jake tends sheep on a bleak island off the British coast and earlier was a very unlucky teen prostitute in the Outback. Yesterday it won Australia's top literary award, the $60,000 Miles Franklin, and last week it won two awards in the UK: The £10,000 Encore (beating Eleanor Catton's Booker winner The Luminaries) and a £5,000 Jerwood Fiction Uncovered prize. Among her seven fellow winners of that award is Bernardine Evaristo for her atypical gay novel Mr. Loverman.

Evie Wyld runs an independent bookshop in South London. Her debut, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, earned her a spot on Granta's once-a-decade list of the Best Young British Novelists.

Born June 26: Stephen McCauley

Stephen McCauley is one of America's great novelists, period. While other authors get lost chasing attention and acceptance or writing precious books no one wants to read, he consistently delivers the very best of what fiction can be: original, funny, wise, and true. On tour for his sixth wonder, Insignificant Others [and Kindle], he said he felt he may have taken the comedy of manners as far as it could go. His successes range from his superb True Enough to his effervescent debut, The Object of My Affection, and three other gems: The Easy Way Out, The Man of the House, and Alternatives to Sex. Like John Banville's Benjamin Black or Joyce Carol Oates' Rosamond Smith, McCauley explored a different genre with the freedom of a new name. If his own books are fine feature films -- and they are! Have you seen the French adaptation of True Enough, called La vérité ou presque, starring Karin Viard and François Cluzet? -- his Rain Mitchell novels are glorious television on the page: big, bright, walloping delights. Start with Tales from the Yoga Studio then shift positions to Head Over Heels. 

You must also read his knockout piece, "Let's Say," about his uneasy truce with his difficult, antigay father in Patrick Merla's collection Boys Like Us. A couple as handsome as they are talented, McCauley and longtime partner Sebastian Stuart (a Ferro-Grumley winner for The Hour Between) live in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Born June 24-25: Rictor Norton, Forrest Reid

Before George Chauncey, before John Boswell, historian Rictor Norton broke a lot of barriers by publishing The Homosexual Literary Tradition in 1972 and, an all-time favorite of mine, Mother Clap's Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England 1700-1830 in 1992. Among his many other books are Myth of the Modern Homosexual: Queer History and the Search for Cultural Unity and an anthology selected for Thebes' best books survey called My Dear Boy: Gay Love Letters Through the Centuries. For anyone interested in queer history, his website is a must.

 

Only a few years after the Oscar Wilde trials, Forrest Reid published his second novel The Garden God: A Tale of Two Boys [and Kindle] while still a student at Christ's College, Cambridge, and with all the ignorant optimism of youth, he dedicated the book to his 62 year-old friend Henry James. The Master was shocked at the gay love story and outraged to be named in it; he never again spoke to Reid. A happier Cambridge connection came with E.M. Forster who continued to write and visit his former pupil until Reid's death in 1947. When a blue plaque was ready for Reid's house in 1952, Forster traveled to Belfast to unveil it. His 1912 novel Following Darkness [and Kindle] is said to be an inspiration for Joyce's 1924 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In 1944 he won the James Tait prize for his sixteenth book of fiction and the climax of his Tom Barber trilogy, Young Tom. Praised in his lifetime for his explorations of boyhood a la Barrie and Walpole, Reid's work is forgotten today. Is it the gay factor or his flowery, sentimental style?

When Gay Characters Happen to Straight Authors...

Know how when you read old-timey novels from the 1960s and 70s in which white authors suddenly tried to do black characters? And the results were jive? We've entered a similar period now, when straight authors are going gay for straight editors and straight readers, none of whom knows our actual history (as with Jo Becker) or the emotional layers of their queer characters. The current disappointing example is last week's fiction in The New Yorker, Madame Lazarus, narrated by an elderly gay man in Paris whose much younger boyfriend gets him a dog to compensate for his many absences during distant business trips. Here are his thoughts on their relationship:

"James is young, far younger than I. When you are the older man, you can be equal, for a time. He has youth and beauty, but you have money and experience. You know many people, and you can take him to Portofino, to Biarritz, to Capri. It is an old story."

Here, as in the entire story, there's nothing unique to the experience of being gay. It might all have been written about an older man and his trophy wife then switched to a gay couple in the final draft. Unfortunately, the flat, trite statements extend everywhere. He says, "I am older now than I thought possible. I did not believe I would ever be this ancient person." And the story evinces zero sense of Paris or the French. The piece's one shocker is that it's written by the reliable Maile Meloy, whose Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It really is worth reading.

A more promising gay male character from a straight author can be found in The Signature of All Things [and Kindle], out today in paperback. One crucial man is a 19th-century globetrotting gentle white Bostonian who discovers sex with a young South Pacific warrior, but back in the states his gay ways bring a world of hurt. Like many readers, I could overlook the book's baggy style and constant repetitions in order to spend several decades with an appealing lady botanist who travels from her native Philadelphia to Tahiti to Amsterdam. With echoes of Andrea Barrett and A.S. Byatt, Elizabeth Gilbert fashions her own enjoyable trip.

...And When Gay History Happens to Straight Players

I, too, can swallow a lot of egomania if it produces results like bringing marriage equality to 38.3 million residents. In their new book Redeeming the Dream: The Case for Marriage Equality spotlight hoggers Ted Olson and David Boies bray about their success with the Prop 8 case at the Supreme Court (while not dwelling on the $6 million fee they earned for their noble quest), but the real triumph was Roberta Kaplan's arguing US vs. Windsor, thus overturning DOMA. That was the gamechanger -- a much bigger deal and a story far better told by lesbian New Yorker staffer Ariel Levy in the magazine's fact piece, The Perfect Wife: How Edith Windsor fell in love, got married, and won a landmark case for gay marriage.

Born June 23: Alan Turing, David Leavitt

Anyone tallying the cost of Britain's homophobia must include all the things Alan Turing didn't solve or invent because he killed himself at 41. The brilliant mathematician had already broken the Germans' Enigma code during WWII, become an OBE, laid the groundwork for the modern computer by designing the Automatic Computing Engine, and devoted himself to the mathematical biology field called morphogenesis (specifically, discerning the Fibonacci numbers in plant structures). In 1952 his home was burgled by two men, one of whom was a 19 year-old Turning had slept with, and as a result of their break-in he was charged with gross indecency under the same 1885 law that felled Oscar Wilde. To avoid prison, he was forced to undergo painful injections of estrogen as a form of chemical castration. He died by eating a poisoned apple. His mother strongly believed the cyanide in the fruit was accidental, owing to her son's legendary carelessness, but his death was ruled a suicide. Timothy Ferris points out that Turing's favorite fairy tale was Snow White. The best short biography of him is The Man Who Knew Too Much by David Leavitt...

 

Raised in Palo Alto, David Leavitt graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale at 21, by which time he had already published a gay themed short story in The New Yorker. His first collection, Family Dancing, appeared the following year and was nominated for an NBCC (losing to Louise Erdrich) and the PEN/Faulkner Award (won by Tobias Wolff). Since then he's published eight novels, among them another PEN/Faulkner finalist, The Indian Clerk; three other collections of stories or novellas; his collected stories; a brief book on Florence; and, a short biography of gay birthday-mate Alan Turing. He is a professor at the University of Florida, where he and his partner Mark Mitchell co-edit the excellent literary journal Subtropics whose fiction is regularly gay and often selected among the year's best. Leavitt and Mitchell also co-edited an anthology of gay fiction from 1748 to 1914, Pages Passed From Hand to Hand. They divide their time between Florida and Tuscany and in their spare time have co-written two other books about Italy. He was named a NYPL Literary Lion. Earlier this month Bloomsbury released the paperback of his much-praised gay/bi novel of Lisbon during the war, The Two Hotel Francforts, which was a finalist for both the Ferro-Grumley and a Lammy.

Queer in Paris, Taipei, and Tokyo

Still more lgbt reads from nyrb classics:

"When the pioneering Taiwanese novelist Qiu Miaojin committed suicide in 1995 at age twenty-six, she left behind her unpublished masterpiece,Last Words from Montmartre [and Kindle]. Unfolding through a series of letters written by an unnamed narrator, Last Words from Montmartre tells the story of a passionate relationship between two young women—their sexual awakening, their gradual breakup, and the devastating aftermath of their broken love. In a style that veers between extremes, from self-deprecation to pathos, compulsive repetition to rhapsodic musings, reticence to vulnerability, Qiu’s genre-bending novel is at once a psychological thriller, a sublime romance, and the author’s own suicide note.

"The letters (which, Qiu tells us, can be read in any order) leap between Paris, Taipei, and Tokyo. They display wrenching insights into what it means to live between cultures, languages, and genders—until the genderless character Zoë appears, and the narrator’s spiritual and physical identity is transformed. As powerfully raw and transcendent as Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Theresa Cha’s Dictée, to name but a few, Last Words from Montmartre proves Qiu Miaojin to be one of the finest experimentalists and modernist Chinese-language writers of our generation."

PW said, "Qiu’s voice, both colloquial and metaphysical, enchants.... It would be wrong to interpret the book’s—or, for that matter, the author’s—ultimate surrender to death as a rejection of the richness of life; rather, like Goethe’s young Werther, this 'last testament' (an alternative translation of the title) affirms the power of literature."

Born June 20: E. Lynn Harris

In 1990, no publisher would take a chance on a first novel about a man torn between his girlfriend and his secret boyfriend, all of them black. Undaunted, the author, a successful IBM salesman who was used to breaking barriers, having been the first black editor of the yearbook at the University of Arkansas and the first black male Razorbacks cheerleader, decided to publish it himself. At black bookstores, book clubs, and beauty salons around Atlanta, he sold thousands of copies to gay men and straight women. A local sales rep mentioned the book’s popularity to the publisher of Anchor/ Doubleday, which quickly republished that novel, Invisible Life, and ten subsequent books by the phenomenal E. Lynn Harris. Nearly all of his books have been NYT bestsellers. His sixth and seventh novels, Not a Day Goes By and Any Way the Wind Blows both debuted at #2 on the NYT list. His author events regularly attracted 900 people or more. Upbeat, optimistic, and romantic, his stories never gloss over life’s struggles and pain. His memoir, What Becomes of the Brokenhearted [Kindle], includes his own coming out story as well as bouts with depression, drinking, low self-esteem, and a suicide attempt just before he decided to start writing. His novel Basketball Jones confronted homophobia and double lives in the NBA. His final novel is In My Father's House was about Bentley Dean III, who ran a modeling agency in Miami:

"Strapped for cash, Bentley reluctantly agrees to supply gay, bi or very open-minded eye candy for a VIP party hosted by Prosperity Gentleman's Club, which is run by Emperor Seth Sinclair, a closeted gay celebrity. When Jah, an 18-year-old student Bentley's been mentoring, covers for a no-show model and begins an affair with Seth, big trouble looms. Harris's wry tale about second chances highlights what readers have long loved about his work: his ability to depict the pursuit of love and self-respect, regardless of societal and family pressures."

While on a business trip in Los Angeles in July 2009, Harris died of heart disease at age 54. To date his books have sold more than four million copies.

Michael Carroll's Little Reef

I'm excited by any book that follows gay characters from Key West to Maine but especially one blurbed so highly by Colm Tóibín, Ann Beattie, Joy Williams, and Tim Miller: Michael Carroll's debut Little Reef and Other Stories [and Kindle] pubbed earlier this week and the University of Wisconsin Press says it heralds

"...the arrival of an original voice in literature. From Key West to Maine, Michael Carroll’s debut collection of stories depicts the lives of characters who are no longer provincial but are not yet cosmopolitan. These women and their gay male friends are “B-listers” of a new, ironic, media-soaked culture. They live in a rich but increasingly divided America, a weirdly paradoxical country increasingly accepting of gay marriage but still marked by prejudice, religious strictures, and swaths of poverty and hopelessness. Carroll shows us people stunned by the shock of the now, who have forgotten their pasts and can’t envision a future." 

Colm Tóibín: “The dialogue is pitch-perfect. Little Reef and Other Stories will, of course,

Born June 17: Carl Van Vechten

Decades ahead of his time, "Harlem's most famous 'Honorary Negro'" was also, despite two wives, fairly open about his many gay relationships -- big leaps for a white Iowan born in 1880. Now, Carl Van Vechten is celebrated primarily as a photographer, but he also was a famously controversial novelist, Gertrude Stein's literary executor, and one of the early 20th century's greatest cultural kingmakers. Yet he has been without a full-scale biography since before Stonewall. This year FSG published London critic Edward White's debut, The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America [Kindle] which covers his queer life in detail, thanks to troves of private papers that have been unsealed since the last biography. White's book arrives with starred reviews from three pre-pub journals including Booklist which calls it "a marvelously written, masterful portrait of an exceptionally complex person." In the New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh praised the book's "startling breadth" and agreed with White's assessment of Van Vechten as a "prophet of a new cultural sensibility that promoted the primacy of the individual, sexual freedom, and racial tolerance and dared put the blues on a par with Beethoven." Library Journal selected it as one of their Four Essential Nonfiction Picks for February.

Author of Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns, David Margolick blurbs, "Journalist, novelist, critic, photographer, iconoclast, visionary. Dandy and groupie, hedonist and dissembler, provocateur and self-promoter. Champion of Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes, drinking buddy of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, "honorary Negro" to some, racist exploiter to others. Denizen of the black and gay demimondes, flouter of racial and sexual divides and taboos. Carl Van Vechten was all of these things, and much more besides, in his brilliant and gaudy life. It would burst an ordinary biography at the seams, but Edward White manages to do to Van Vechten in death what no one ever accomplished in life: tame him. With wit, style, and skepticism, The Tastemaker both cuts Van Vechten down to size and restores to him the lofty stature he deserves."

Two years ago, Yale published Emily Bernard's much-praised Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White [Kindle] which does incorporate Van Vechten's gay affairs, including his interracial, intergenerational relationship with the closeted young novelist Wallace Thurman, author of The Blacker the Berry, but Bernard's book is not a full biography.

The thorny issue of white patronage of black artists is the heart of one of Kevin Killian's favorite books last year, Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance [Kindle only $2.99].

Van Vechten's photo work can be seen The Homoerotic Photography of Carl Van Vechten: Public Face, Private Thoughts, as well as in Portraits and Passionate Observer and Extravagant Crowd.

Gay American Authors Compete for Italy's Premio Bottari Lattes Grinzane

The only American finalists for the 2014 Premio Bottari Lattes Grinzane, honoring the year's best fiction published in Italy, are two gay men: Peter Cameron, for a belated translation of his early, deeply moving gay novel The Weekend [and Kindle], and Andrew Sean Greer, who won, for The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells [and Kindle], a book that suffered here for pubbing against Kate Atkinson's multiple lives novel Life After Life. The other finalists were Kim Leine (winner of last year's Nordic Council Literature Prize), Stefania Bertola, and Alessandro Mari.

Photos of the celebrations here and here.

 

Born June 16: Jaime Manrique

Born illegitimately in Colombia of an adulterous union, Jaime Manrique was not publicly acknowledged by his rich, prominent father who soon moved on to another mistress. His childhood struggles are just one facet of Manrique's landmark queer Latino Lit book Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig, and Me. Some of the same early memories also surface in his book of poems, My Night with Federico García Lorca. His mother moved the family to Florida, where she became a domestic servant and Jaime excelled at school, earning his BA in English from the University of South Florida. After two more or less bisexual novels that got a lot of attention in Colombia, Manrique's first openly gay novel Latin Moon in Manhattan made a splash here in 1992. Five years later he edited Besame Mucho: New Gay Latino Fiction, which features seventeen short stories. He's won a Guggenheim for his nonfiction, and four years ago he made a foray into Isabel Allende and Tomas Eloy Martinez territory with Our Lives Are the Rivers, his long-promised novel about Manuela Saenz, Simón Bolívar's mistress. It won the International Latino Book Award for best historical novel. His newest book is Cervantes Street, which earned rave blurbs from Junot Diaz, Esmeralda Santiago, and Edith Grossman. Read him.

Frank O'Connor Prize Shortlist

Evenly divided between women and men, this year's Frank O'Connor Prize shortlist consists of one Scottish, one Irish, and four American authors. Announced in July, the winner will receive €25,000.

• Colin Barrett, Young Skins
• A.L. Kennedy, All the Rage
• Phil Klay, Redeployment
• Ben Marcus, Leaving the Sea
• Lorrie Moore, Bark
• Laura van den Berg, The Isle of Youth

Among previous winners are Yiyun Li, Jhumpa Lahiri, Haruki Murakami, Miranda July, Edna O'Brien, Ron Rash, and Nathan Englander. Last year's surprise winner was David Constantine for Tea at the Midland.

David Pratt's Looking After Joey

Novels and porn stars...David Pratt animates both. Three years after his fanciful tale of a living book, Bob the Book [and Kindle], won the Lambda Literary Award for debut gay fiction, he returns with a second novel about a porn star who steps through the tv screen and into his protagonists' lives, Looking After Joey [and Kindle]. His publisher, Wilde City Press, says:

"From the author of Bob the Book comes a funny, fast-paced, touching tale of love, laughter, family of choice and fabulousness! Wouldn’t it be great if a porn character stepped out of the TV, into your life? Well, be careful what you wish for. Because that’s how Calvin and Peachy end up looking after Joey. And teaching him everything he needs to know to be be a gay man in New York City. His final exam? A fabulous Labor Day party on Fire Island. But first, they all have to get invited. This will involve a rogues’ gallery of eccentric Manhattanites, including portly, perspiring publicist Bunce van den Troell; theatrical investor Sir Desmond Norma; studly thespian Clive Tidwell-Smidgin; lubricant king Fred Pflester; and a mysterious young man named Jeffrey. Tender, wise, witty and often utterly deranged, Looking After Joey will make you wish that you, too, had a porn character sitting at your kitchen table, pointing at the toast and asking, 'What's this called again?'"

The Sound of Things Falling Wins €100,000 IMPAC Dublin Award

Juan Gabriel Vásquez has won the €100,000 IMPAC Dublin Award for his third novel, inspiring the jury to say, "The Sound of Things Falling [and Kindle] is a consummate literary thriller that resonates long after the final page. Through a masterly command of layered time periods, spiralling mysteries and a noir palette, it reveals how intimate lives are overshadowed by history; how the past preys on the present; and how the fate of individuals as well as countries is moulded by distant, or covert, events."

Among the ten finalists from 152 nominees were two gay-inclusive books -- The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng and Absolution by Patrick Flanery -- as well as Ten White Geese by Gerbrand Bakker, Questions of Travel by Michelle de Kretser, My Struggle: Book One by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Three Strong Women by Marie NDiaye, Traveler of the Century by Andrés Neuman, The Light of Amsterdam by David Park, and The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan.

The IMPAC Dublin is my very favorite literary award, previously honoring Gerbrand Bakker, Colm Toibin, Orhan Pamuk, Edward P. Jones, and Per Petterson... each before they broke out in America.

Born June 11: Allan Gurganus

Blessed with a runaway blockbuster selling two million copies, cursed with his biggest success coming with his debut, Allan Gurganus has seen his 1989 first novel Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All adapted in 1994 into a hit television miniseries nominated for nine Emmys, winning four, and in 2003 become a Broadway flop, closing after one official performance. Fifteen years before that book, at twenty-six in 1974, with the encouragement of John Cheever, he published a story called Minor Heroism in The New Yorker, which was the first time the magazine ran fiction with an openly gay protagonist. Thankfully, the gay characters have continued, though slowly. Recipient of a Guggenheim, a Lammy, the Sue Kaufman Prize, and an Ingram Merrill award, Gurganus is not a prolific writer. It had been twelve years since his last book, the really wonderful The Practical Heart: Four Novellas from 2001, when last year he published a new collection of three novellas once again set in his Falls, North Carolina: earning strong reviews, Local Souls [and Kindle] was chosen twice on Thebes' best books survey. Before these collections, in 1997 he published his second novel, the rollicking, sad, all-gay New York saga Plays Well with Others [and Kindle], and in 1990 the story collection White People. Gurganus long ago moved back to his native North Carolina where his activism included co-founding Writers Against Jesse Helms. Today is 67 and continues to work on his still-gestating third novel, The Erotic History of a Southern Baptist Church.

Chris Shirley's Playing by the Book

Ten years in the making, Chris Shirley's debut novel out today Playing By The Book [and Kindle] has already been named by the Advocate as one of this summer's ten great lgbt reads:

"Jake Powell is a 17-year-old high school newspaper editor and the son of a preacher man at home in Alabama, but when he lands a spot at Columbia University's prestigious summer journalism program, his New York City dreams become real. What New York does for Jake, of course, is to bring all his feelings to the surface, including his burgeoning attraction to a handsome classmate. In his first novel, Shirley — president of the Lambda Literary Foundation— offers up a optimistic but not overly romanticized look at youth, becoming oneself, and the discomfort and joy that comes from finding out who you want to be in the world, whether your parents like it or not." 

"A Story about Gay London": Peter Ackroyd's Three Brothers

Why did Peter Ackroyd's autobiographical fifteenth novel Three Brothers [and Kindle] launch so tepidly in the U.S. three months ago? Is it a rushed effort from a too-prolific author who has also written more than 30 books of nonfiction? Or is it too queer for American critics? (And for its publisher, who degayed the flap copy.) The novel follows Harry, Daniel, and Sam Hanway from grim postwar Camden to 1970s Soho. In adulthood the boys grow apart yet each life intersects with the same Londoners, the boorish newspaper baron Sir Martin Flaxman, a slumlord Asher Ruppta, and -- what many critics consider the most likable character in the novel -- a gay hustler/pickpocket called Sparkler.

The Express: "What starts as a kind of social history of life in the capital after the war (Ackroyd has also written a history of London and it shows) turns into a melodramatic potboiler, with blackmail, murder and madness at its heart...this also turns into a story about gay London...Just about all of the main male characters are gay (including the straight ones) and one of the few female characters in Three Brothers is at pains to stress that she doesn't like sex...However, if you are in the mood for a story that gathers pace after a slow start and will not conform to expectation, while throwing in a dash of the supernatural, this is entertaining and a lot of fun."

The Telegraph: "Three Brothers is an alternative autobiography, a ghost story and a murder mystery all in one slim volume. Dickens, Blake and Eliot – all subjects of lives by Ackroyd – cast shadows over the three-ply narrative that is full of chance and coincidence, 'alliances and affinities', 'contenders and young pretenders', shape-shifters and shirt-lifters. Offended? Then this clever, camp novel – which includes a chapter titled 'Sausage Land' – is definitely not for you...The brilliant result is the quintessence of Ackroyd."

Among the best of his early novels are The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), Hawksmoor (winner of a Whitbread), and Chatterton, shortlisted for the Booker.

Julia Glass Brings Back Gay Protagonist from Three Junes, Sequel

Fenno McLeod, the bookstore-owning gay man who was the soul of Julia Glass's National Book Award winning debut Three Junes and returned in her second novel The Whole World Over, emerges again in her new, fifth novel, And the Dark Sacred Night [and Kindle]. Once more exploring the many forms of family, Glass tells this story in close third-person from five points of view, from nearly as many locations: New Jersey to Vermont to Cape Cod. At forty, inert Kit Noonan seeks out the father he's never known, against his mother Daphne's wishes. She was eighteen when she gave birth to him and had once been the lover of Malachy Burns, Fenno's musical friend who died of aids in Three Junes. On his quest Kit meets, among others, Malachy's mother and Fenno and his partner Walter Kinderman. The Dallas Morning News critic says, "Glass’s prose is so lovely and filled with felicitous phrases and insights that when she orchestrates a family reunion, the reader is apt to just follow along like Kit, knowing the music is bound to enthrall."

Born June 8: Marguerite Yourcenar

By the time she was eight, Brussels-born Marguerite Cleenewerck de Crayencour was reading Aristophanes. By ten she was learning Latin, and at twelve, Greek. In 1929, when she published her first novel, Alexis, about a closeted gay man leaving his family, she chose to write under an anagram of her surname, Yourcenar. In 1937, she and her American translator, Grace Frick, fell in love and remained together forty-two years until Frick’s death in 1979. The following year, Yourcenar became the first woman ever elected to the French Academy, established in 1635, suppressed in 1793, and restored in 1803. To date, 726 people have been elected “immortals,” eight of them women. Among the many renowned French writers who were never elected to the Academy are Moliere, Balzac, Zola, and Proust. Yourcenar wrote novels, stories, poems, essays, a book-length study of Mishima, and three volumes of her autobiography, yet her exalted reputation is based mainly on her masterpiece, Memoirs of Hadrian. Like Mary Renault, Yourcenar chose to address homosexuality in her work through male characters, especially those in antiquity, and her novel fully describes Hadrian’s great love for Antinous, a youth of astonishing beauty and athletic grace. She and Frick first vacationed on Mount Desert Island, Maine, in 1942, and moved there full-time in 1950, in a house they called Petite Plaisance, which today survives as a museum.