Band of Thebes

Four Australian Writers Debate Queer Literature

Sophie Cunningham moderates a panel of Benjamin Law, Fiona McGregor, and William Yang discussing the usual issues -- labels, semantics, ghettoization, gender issues, generation gaps, and the "death knell" of queer books -- all done with charming Aussie accents. Fiona says, "Sex is at the heart of any decent writer, going back to Sappho and Homer."

It's part of the Big Gay Week at Melbourne's leading literary spot, the Wheeler Centre. Other videos feature coming out stories and a lecture by Helen Razer arguing against funding gay art which she says is “as desperately needed as promoting white men in politics.”

Colm Tóibín on Edward Carpenter

One of the few things we can agree on with certainty is that we would all be better people if we read Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love by Sheila Rowbotham. Jeanette Winterson and Peter Tatchell named it their favorite book of last year and now finally the current London Review of Books has an essay about it by Colm Tóibín. He loved it, particularly because Carpenter's prime decades of promoting homosexuality and socialism and healthy diets and sandal wearing and nudism happened to coincide with the sea change in British life from the mid-Victorian age to the Great Depression.

In 1874 he wrote to Walt Whitman, whose work he had first read six years earlier. ‘Because you have,’ he wrote, ‘given me a ground for the love of men I thank you continually in my heart . . . For you have made men to be not ashamed of the noblest instinct of their nature. Women are beautiful; but to some, there is that which passes the love of women.’ What was strange about Carpenter in these early years was that his homosexuality did not make him timid or fearful; instead, with the help of Whitman’s poetry, it lit a fire in him which made him interested in all kinds of freedom and progress, made him eloquent, outspoken and spiritually curious. It made him seek allies and draw people towards him, including those who had more interest in socialism or trade unionism than in homosexuality. He managed all his life to defeat, or at least to defuse, that tendency in left-wing movements to view homosexuality with more rigid disapproval than any church ever has.

Two excerpts from Carpenter's own work show what a forward and timeless thinker he was. He faulted earlier, Victorian society for its

commercialism in public life . . . cant in religion, pure materialism in science, futility in social conventions, the worship of stocks and shares, the starving of the human heart, the denial of the body and its needs, the huddling concealment of the body in clothes, the ‘impure hush’ on matters of sex, class-division, contempt of manual labour, and the cruel banning of women from every natural and useful expression of their lives.

That was written in 1916. Eight years earlier, Carpenter had published a book about homosexuality in which he wrote:

I have said that the Urning men in their own lives put love before money-making, business success, fame and other motives which rule the normal man. I am sure that it is also true of them that they put love before lust . . . I believe it is true that Uranian men are superior to the normal man in this respect – in respect of their love-feeling – which is gentler, more sympathetic, more considerate, more a matter of the heart and less of mere physical satisfaction than that of ordinary men. All this flows naturally from the presence of the feminine element in them, and its blending with the rest of their nature.

Was Tóibín feeling frisky when wrote the review? A long (frankly skippable) preamble mentions how he "set about enticing two nice Catalan boys back to my flat" in Barcelona in 1977, and he relays many sexual details of Carpenter's life, most memorably his randy adventures at night and again the next morning with a young American visitor when he was eighty.

In an act of lunacy, Verso chose to release the U.S. edition of the book three days before Christmas. Six weeks later, this important biography has garnered exactly zero reviews. Don't miss it.

A Perfect Waiter by Alain Claude Sulzer

Last week while America was busy inaugurating, Bloomsbury released the paperback of A Perfect Waiter. It is the first of Alain Claude Sulzer's eight novels to be translated into English and it received excellent reviews throughout Europe, from A to Z: "A beautifully written and quietly devastating novel" (Attitude) to "Alain Claude Sulzer writes with utterly classical, old-fashioned aplomb" (Die Zeit).

More importantly, it won the 2008 Prix Medicis etranger, one of the world's few literary prizes that pits novels against nonfiction, to honor the year's best book by a non-French writer. Previous winners this decade have been Michael Ondaatje, Philip Roth, Orhan Pamuk, and Daniel Mendelsohn. It appears that this was the first time the prize was awarded to a gay novel.

PW said

In 1966 Switzerland, self-possessed, middle-aged Erneste is the rock of the Restaurant am Berg, working the lavish Blue Room without missing a shift in 16 years. A letter posted from New York threatens to shatter the orderly cocoon he's built around himself. Claiming to be in a bad way from every angle, Jakob Meier, Erneste's one great love of 30 years ago, pleads with Erneste to track down Julius Klinger, the intellectual whom Jakob followed to America in 1936. Klinger, Jakob tells Erneste, has returned to Europe, been nominated for a Nobel prize and lives near Erneste; Jakob wants Erneste to ask Klinger for money, and to send it. Erneste is immediately torn between his tidy independence and intense longing. Sulzer sure-handedly layers the past on the present, gradually opening windows on both. The pieces fall together like bits of a puzzle, with a full portrait of Erneste and the truth about his relationship with Jakob coming together only at the end, powerfully.

More praise:

"It tells a compelling love story between two men both working in a grand hotel in the 1930s This is elegant writing, perfectly pitched to reflect the sadness and regret attendant on such a liaison." Rodney Troubridge, Booksellers' Choice, Bookseller

"The real perfect waiter of the title is, I suspect, the author himself. Like his hero, he is unobtrusive and alarming in equal measure he does his job not just with great polish, but with real heart." Guardian

"Sulzer carefully walks a tightrope between the tender and the erotic A melancholy, shocking tale." Irish Times

"Sulzer's novel, or rather novella, has great stylistic elegance, and offers many enjoyments and pleasures beyond its subtle abundance of literary allusion. His skill lies more in small observations than dramatic sweep." Suddeutsche Zeitung

"It's as if an opulent Magic Mountain, a memory in fading colours of a mundane love story, has been photographed anew." Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Born January 17: Tom Dolby

Early last week I promised to write about Tom Dolby today, but the only Trouble Boy I'm having now (traveling in oddly balmy Anchorage) is with the internets. Instead, you can amuse yourself by looking at his West Village apartment, which he told the New York Times reminds him of a Doris Day movie.

Lambda Awards Submissions Posted and Missing

Charles Flowers has posted an updated list of titles publishers submitted to this year's Lambda Awards, and the good news is you have a lot of browsing to do in twenty-two categories of lgbt books. Particularly gratifying is the inclusion among the gay men's titles of friend and former colleague Elizabeth Maguire's posthumous novel about Henry James and Constance Woolson, The Open Door. (Liz died of ovarian cancer in April 2006.) While not a year overloaded with marquee names, the 2008 list offers several familiar authors: Scott Heim, Jim Grimsley, Jay Quinn, Bart Yates, Joseph Olson, Chris Adrian, Gary Zebrun, Stewart Lewis, Jameson Currier, Tom Dolby, and Rich Merritt, among others. The lesbian list features Alison Bechdel, Emma Donoghue, and Stephanie Grant.

I look forward to further updates, said to be coming "in the next few days," because to be blunt the fiction winner won't mean much if the competition doesn't include Andrew Sean Greer's The Story of a Marriage, Benjamin Taylor's The Book of Getting Even, or Alain Claude Sulzer's A Perfect Waiter. It would be a capital crime if FSG, Steerforth, and Bloomsbury didn't submit these books. The same goes for Atlas Books and Edmund White's missing biography Rimbaud. The Lambda website says the deadline was six weeks ago, December 1, 2008.

Finalists will be announced by March 15. The awards dinner will be held in New York City on May 28.

Born January 13: Edmund White, Matthew Bourne

If the phrase "man of letters" isn't too fusty, it applies to no one better than Edmund White. He's equally accomplished in a variety of locales, languages, time periods, and literary genres: fiction, travel, memoir, biography, criticism, drama, and cultural observation. Last week you learned that he is the contemporary writer John Irving re-reads most often and whose new books he most anticipates. Irving called White's recent fiction, Hotel de Dream,"flawless" and said that White's 1982 novel A Boy's Own Story far outshines Cather in the Rye. (A Boy's Own Story is absolutely mandatory. If you haven't read it, now you have another resolution for 2009.) Readers of all stripes owe White thanks for rescuing Jean Genet with his NBCC award-winning biography, and gay readers in particular are indebted to his honesty about sex and his longtime hiv-positive status. (That debt may not extend to his rather downbeat, hustler-dwelling My Lives; read his other books first; his Parisian stroll The Flâneur provides a nicer sense of his melancholy.) A professor at Princeton, White has been made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an Officier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France. Today he turns 69.

Should Matthew Bourne be everyone's role model? At 49, he combines such vast expertise and originality that he has permanently altered his profession, and he's done it by being gay. In 1995 he cast male dancers as the swans in Swan Lake and became a sensation throughout the world. Writing in The New Yorker years later, Joan Acocella said, "it made an old love story romantic again, by making it seem dangerous." Other critics called it "a miracle." Contrary to some purist's grumblings, his Swan Lake is not a gimmick. The rigid establishment has embraced it, adding it to the standard A Level syllabus for dance majors in Britain. Nor is it too elitist. Extremely in demand to choreograph other people's big West End musicals, Bourne's goal with own productions is to make dance interesting to people who ordinarily would avoid it. He enlivened the stale favorite The Nutcracker; created a version of Bizet's Carmen called The Car Man with plenty of shirtless greasemonkeys and a homoerotic subplot adapted from The Postman Always Rings Twice; transformed Edward Scissorhands into a full-length dance; and created a piece called Play Without Words, based on the 60s movie The Servant. Acocella's fact piece on Bourne from March 12, 2007 remains the best profile of him, in part because she directly addresses the gay aspect. He says he specifically wants his work to make homosexuality acceptable. He is planning an all-male version of Romeo & Juliet called Romeo, Romeo.

Stay with this clip at least till 2:35, then you'll be hooked. (And bear in mind this was for the Royal Variety Performance, broadcast in the UK. Compare that to the extreme unlikelihood of the Kennedy Center Honors doing a gay romance.)

The Sixth Form Now in Paperback

Tom Dolby's second novel, The Sixth Form, is just out in paperback. During senior year at a New England boarding school, Ethan, a new student from California, is befriended by rich kid Todd and a predatory female teacher, Hannah. Difficulties ensue, and one of them comes out. Last year the book garnered several good notices. I haven't read it but I suspect, like so many literary novels, particularly those with gay themes, it had a hard time getting reviewed. The only mainstream paper on Dolby's website is the San Francisco Chronicle, where his first novel The Trouble Boy was a best seller. Publishers Weekly found The Sixth Form  "beautifully observed... a reminder of how close disaster always is when you're seventeen." The constantly cranky Kirkus called it "timid and superficial." Decide for yourself. And get ready for his YA series Secret Society which I'll write about on January 17.

Ali Smith's First Person & Other Stories

When you think of excellent, living British writers who happen to be lesbians, do you stop after Sarah Waters and Jeanette Winterson? Ali Smith should be right there. Author of four collections of stories, a shortish retelling of the Iphis myth, a nonfiction book about reading, and three major novels, she has twice been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, twice shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and won a Whitbread [now Costa] Award. On sale yesterday in the U.S., her newest collection The First Person and Other Stories earned a rave review from Publishers Weekly:

Smith handily proves the truism that everyone has their own tale to tell in this bangup collection. From "The History of History," where a young narrator focuses on the fashion-related aspects of the beheading of Mary, queen of Scots, to block out problems at home, to "Writ," where a grown woman sits down for an involved chat with her 14-year-old self, the author takes readers on lyrical rides through the lives of everyday Britons....At once quirky and compulsively readable, this collection puts a layered and enjoyable spin on the many forms of the short story.

If stories aren't your thing, you might try Hotel World or The Accidental. Among her fans is Alain de Botton, who said, "She's a genius, genuinely modern in the heroic, glorious sense."

John Irving: Most Reread, Anticipated Contemporary Is Edmund White

While I was lost in The New Yorker, Andy Towle was tracking down the Nashville Scene (via the National Post) for an interview with John Irving from November. Irving reveals his next novel, coming in October, is called Last Night in Twisted River and it's his third political novel, though "not as overtly political" as Cider House or Owen Meany. He also shares his adult dislike of Catcher in the Rye and his love of Edmund White. He said:

And I am reading Edmund White's Hotel de Dream—what White calls "a New York novel." It's also historical: about Stephen Crane, who is dying, dictating a novel to his wife—about a boy prostitute in New York in the 1890s. It's a novel-within-a-novel, and it's flawless. I love Edmund White. Every time I read a new book of his, I am reminded of a previous book of his, which I then reread. I've interrupted Hotel de Dream to reread White's novel A Boy's Own Story, which I love, and White's autobiography My Lives. He's a wonderful writer. We're the same age, and I remember when I first read A Boy's Own Story—in the early 1980s—and I thought that the novel spoke much more to me about a boy coming of age (even though it's about a gay boy coming of age, and I'm not gay) than The Catcher in the Rye ever did. I reread The Catcher in the Rye recently, and it doesn't hold up at all; it's just not very well, or very consistently, written. But A Boy's Own Story is beautifully wrought, and fiercely defiant; I could reread that novel every year and find something terrific I had missed in a previous reading.

I believe Edmund White is one of the best writers of my generation; he's certainly the contemporary American writer I reread more than any other, and the one whose next book I look forward to reading most.

 

Anticipation Overload: Books of 2009

Now that the new year truly has begun, let's look ahead to some significant books of 2009. Goes without saying release dates are subject to change, especially in the second half of the year. (Many of the titles by British authors will be out earlier there if you want to import. For example, the Ishiguro will be released May 7 in the UK, September 22 in the US.) Yes, there's a mix of authors here, some of whom I never read, in the interest of readers' eclectic tastes.

1/6    Ali Smith, First Person and Other Stories

1/9    Stacey D’Erasmo, The Sky Below

1/27  E. Lynn Harris, Basketball Jones

2/3    Yiyun Li, The Vagrants

2/17  Dale Peck, Body Surfing 

3/3   Zoe Heller, The Believers

3/3   Jonathan Littell, The Kindly Ones

4/1   Bahaa' Taher, As Doha Said

4/22  A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book

4/28  Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You paperback

4/30  Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger

5/5   Benjamin Taylor, The Book of Getting Even paperback

5/6   Colm Toibin, Brooklyn

5/9   Chuck Palahniuk, Pygmy

5/12  Preeta Samarasan, Evening Is the Whole Day paperback

5/12  Tom Rob Smith, The Secret Speech

6/2   Sara Gruen, Ape House

6/16  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck (stories)

6/16  Monica Ali, In the Kitchen

6/16  Anita Brookner, Strangers

summer  Alice Munro, new collection (she said "next summer")

8/4   Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice

8/25  William Trevor, Love and Summer

9/1   Bahaa' Taher, The Sunset Oasis

9/2   Anne Tyler, Noah's Compass

9/4   Martin Amis, The Pregnant Widow

9/8   Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

9/8   Jane Smiley, untitled horse novel #1

9/15  Lorrie Moore, The Gate at the Stairs (novel)

9/15  Mavis Gallant, Going Ashore: Uncollected Stories

9/15  Jonathan Lethem, untitled novel

9/22  Kazuo Ishiguro, Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music & Nightfall

9/??   Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

9/??  Philip Roth, The Humbling

10/?  Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence

10/? Raymond Carver, Beginners

10/? Dave Eggers, The Wild Things

10/? Per Petterson, I Curse the River of Time

?? Frankfurt deal memo said 2009 for Michael Cunningham's "contemporary novel set in New York"

George Chauncey is more than a decade past his original contractual due date for his sequel to Gay New York, and Alan Hollinghurst is a couple years past his first due date for his next novel after The Line of Beauty. Also overdue is Dorothy Allison's next novel, She Who. Maybe this is the year. Ditto for Dan Brown's novel about Freemasons, whose working title is The Solomon Key.

Gay Books / Authors in the Guardian's Survey of Last Year's Favorites

The very best and most useful year-end roundup of books is always the Guardian's survey of author favorites, both for new discoveries and for reconfirming literary soulmates. Among the six gay respondents' choices, three titles were doubly honored. Do follow the links to read their specific praise [click the names for their opinions, click the titles to buy the books].

Alan Hollinghurst: The Lost Leader [poems] by Mick Imlah

Adam Mars-Jones: The Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam

Alex Ross: How Fiction Works by James Woods; Ezra Pound: Poet Volume One by David Moody; The Danger of Music by Richard Taruskin; The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria

Peter Tatchell: Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love by Sheila Rowbotham

Colm Tóibín: The Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam; The Lost Leader [poems] by Mick Imlah; The Ingmar Bergman Archives by Paul Durcan and Bengt Wanselius

Jeanette Winterson: Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love by Sheila Rowbotham; The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doidge.

And several nongay authors named gay books among their favorites of the year. Look who (deservedly) got three mentions:

Monica Ali: Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader

A.S. Byatt: Philip Hensher's The Northern Clemency

Margaret Drabble: Adam Mars-Jones' Pilcrow

Hanif Kureishi: Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise

Pankaj Mishra: Janet Malcolm's Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice

Trevor Phillips: Andrew Sean Greer's The Story of a Marriage

Phillip Pullman: Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise

Craig Raine: George Monteiro's Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop

Adam Thirlwell: Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise

As for other books, this year's big favorites (ranging from five to three votes each) were Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture, Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth, Zoë Heller's The Believers, J.G. Ballard's autobiography Miraces of Life, and Richard Holmes' nonfiction about 18th and 19th century scientists, The Age of Wonder, forthcoming here in July.

Receiving two mentions were: Richard Price's Lush Life, David Lodge's Deaf Sentence, Tom Rob Smith's Child 44, Roger Deakin's Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, Julian Barnes' Nothing To Be Frightened Of about death, and Darian Leader's The New Black about grief. Lastly, also with two strong votes, what purports to be a Hollywood memoir by Tarzan's sidekick, Me Cheeta, has no author yet wins extremely high praise ("also riddled with the seemingly tossed-off aperçus and turns of phrase of a startling literary talent") from the most praised author on the list, Joseph O'Neill.

Queerty's Ten Best Gay Books of 2008

 

Dubious, but in the spirit of promoting gay books, here's the link to Queerty's "top ten books of 2008 that belong on a gay's bookshelf." At number one is queer friendly straight man Jonathan Ames' roman a clef called The Alcoholic, and more bizarrely at number five is Curtis Sittenfeld's not at all disguised novel about the departing first lady (with no mention of any gay content). The highest ranked of the nonfiction titles is Terrance Dean's Hiding in Hip Hop: On the Down Low in the Entertainment Industry, followed by openly gay John Barrowman's showbiz memoir Anything Goes.

Born December 19: Jean Genet

Flashback to 1949: South Pacific opened on Broadway, James Gould Cozzens won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, All the King's Men won the Oscar for Best Picture, and in France, Jean Genet received his tenth criminal conviction, which meant he would be sent to prison for life. In the preceding five years he had published his five groundbreaking novels, as well as three plays and dozens of poems, all of which were greatly esteemed by his European contemporaries despite his focus on petty thieves and his inclusion of gay sex. As news of his dire situation spread, rather than ostracizing Genet, the leading intellectuals rallied to his defense, and with a public push from Cocteau, Sartre, and Picasso, among others, Genet was pardoned by the French president. It is safe to say Harry Truman would not have done the same because at that point Genet's fiction was still banned in the United States. Genet never returned to prison after that, nor did he ever publish another novel, although he continued to write plays, poems, and a memoir, Un Captif Amoureux, published in 1986, the year after he died of throat cancer. For the full story, treat yourself to Edmund White's Genet: A Biography.

Big Trips: Gay Travel with White, Peck, Klein, Hamburger, & Geltmaker

Raphael Kadushin, the travel writer and book editor, has just published Big Trips, a new anthology of current travel writing by gay authors, five of whom read from their contributions last night in New York. During the Q&A, Kadushin argued that travel literature is "quintessentially a gay form," because gay people are strangers in their own land and natural ethnographers, able to read new cultures quickly and closely. He said he also wanted to reclaim serious travel writing from what it has devolved to: "thread counts and ten best lists and what to see in ten hours."

All the readers were delights. If you've ever heard extraordinary Michael Klein or Dale Peck or Edmund White, you know how entertaining they are. Klein earned the night's biggest laughs with his nevertheless serious essay about his unequal love affairs in Provincetown the summer of Hurricane Bob. White read about traveling with a hot mec in a small Moroccan town bordering the Sahara, Zagora (where I happened to be two years ago, hence my photos of it). Peck read from his brilliant story, "The Law of Diminishing Returns," which discusses thrift and reusing things and declares, "Love is like trash." Aaron Hamburger and Ty Geltmaker were new to me and both were particularly enjoyable. Hamburger's fiction will resonate especially with everyone who has made the mistake of expecting any aspect of life to be like any aspect of porn, specifically anyone who's been to Prague's gay bars and noticed the gulf between reality and Bel Ami. (His protagonist moves there out of love for video star Lukas.)  I don't know anything about the other pieces but I liked the descriptions: 

For Aaron Hamburger the big trip is a brave flirtation in Prague. For Dale Peck it’s an oddly romantic whirl through the clubs of London, and for Michael Klein it is the golden light of Provincetown, where everything seems possible. Duncan Fallowell sees classic sensuality in a Sicilian waiter, and Trebor Healey tries to find some sense of home along purely American backroads. Mack Friedman wanders through Mexico, Andrew Holleran confronts the wasteland of northern Florida, Bruce Benderson returns to a transformed San Francisco, Raphael Kadushin drives through a furry Yorkshire, and Ty Geltmaker remembers Rome when it really did approximate la dolce vita. Edmund White takes a double trip, through Paris and Morocco, and Martin Sherman visits a Greek island, where the intrepid traveler, just starting out, confronts his own loneliness.

Benjamin Taylor's Novel Named Among Year's Best by L.A. Times

Well earned congratulations to Benjamin Taylor. The editors of the Los Angeles Times revealed their favorite titles of 2008, among them his remarkable second novel, The Book of Getting Even, about a young gay Southerner's attachments - erotic, fevered, platonic - to a sterling family of Eastern European intellectuals. The New Yorker said, "Taylor captures their quests for identity in pitch-perfect dialogue and lengthy meditative passages; his elegant plotting feels at once deliberate and improvised."

Overall, the LAT list has the most interesting choices of any roundup so far, despite vexing omissions like Olive Kitteridge and The Story of a Marriage. It's particularly gratifying to see Miriam Toews' The Flying Troutmans included, especially after the NYTBR's wrongheaded review. Their nonfiction list has Honor Moore's memoir about her father's decades-long secret gay life while leading the Episcopal church of New York, The Bishop's Daughter.

Born December 6: Sylvia Townsend Warner

During four decades of The New Yorker's glory years, the magazine published 150 short stories by the English writer Sylvia Townsend Warner, yet, as John Updike says, her work "never quite won her the flaming place in the heavens of repute that she deserved." Her first novel, Lolly Willowes (1925), concerns a middle-aged woman who is not interested in men and becomes a witch instead. Her second novel, Mr. Fortune's Maggot (1927), concerns a middle-aged gay clergyman who while doing missionary work in the South Seas falls in love with a native young man and loses his faith. Lolly Willowes was the very first selection of the Book of the Month Club, and both novels were major successes in America and the United Kingdom. More novels, collections of stories, poems, and a biography of T.H. White followed, though at a slower pace and to smaller sales. Much has been made of her close, literary friendship with her New Yorker editor and author of the classic gay novel The Folded Leaf, William Maxwell, immortalized in a collection of their letters from 1938 to 1978. Less discussed is her greatest love, her partner of thirty-nine years, the poet Valentine Ackland. Although the two women died nine years apart, their ashes are buried together beneath a single stone in a churchyard in Chaldon Herring, Dorset.

NYTBR Notable Books of 2008 Missing Essential Gay Titles

Next Sunday's NYT Book Review names one hundred notable titles of 2008 and though no such list can ever capture a year's riches, this list is noticeably weak on important books by gay writers. Among the missing are National Book Award winner Mark Doty's poetry Fire to Fire, National Book Critics Circle Award winner Daniel Mendelsohn's essay collection How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken, NBCC winner Edmund White's Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel, Benjamin Taylor's novel The Book of Getting Even, David Ebershoff's The 19th Wife, and Scott Heim's We Disappear. Confoundingly, the editors also omit a spectacular not gay work of fiction called Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout and Louise Erdrich's novel The Plague of Doves, which Philip Roth calls "her dazzling masterpiece."

If you're interested in the craft of literature, read Ben Taylor's new interview with Carlin M. Wragg at Open Loop Press. It's called "Fiction as Fibbing" and is insightful, erudite, and self-effacing in his signature style. Discussing creativity and the inadvertent, he says:

I think you pay for whatever it is you find out in the course of writing a novel by not finding out so much else, by not realizing everything. It really is a way of knowing without knowing all.

UPDATE: Charlene reminds me I forgot Andrew Sean Greer's novel The Story of a Marriage. Overnight I remembered John Rechy's memoir, About My Life and the Kept Woman. There must be many others. Please comment or email me.

Born November 26: John Amaechi

Growing up, John Amaechi always felt different: He was 6'10", mixed-race, with a Nigerian father and a British mother who raised him in Stockport, England, then he was doubly an outsider attending high school in the mid-1980s in Toldeo, Ohio and college at Vanderbilt and Penn State. So being gay was just one more distinction. Naturally he played basketball, but he was atypical in professional sports as well. In 2000, Amaechi turned down a $17 million contract with the Los Angeles Lakers in order to play for $600,000 a year with the Orlando Magic. His reason? Three years before, Orlando had been the only team to consider picking him up after his European stint. He also played for the Chicago Bulls, the Houston Rockets, and the Utah Jazz before retiring in 2003. His career stats can be found here. Early in 2007 he became the first player associated with the NBA to come out, when ESPN Books published his autobiography, Man in the Middle. He is beautifully articulate. He owns a consulting company that provides motivational speakers and executive training, and he runs the ABC Foundation in Manchester which works to build youth sports centers throughout the U.K.

Mark Doty Wins National Book Award

Twenty-one years after his first book was published, Mark Doty has won the National Book Award for his seventh volume of poetry, Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems. Like his four books of nonfiction, Doty's poems are explicit about gay life, love, and sex. One of his early poems collected here is about Hadrian's lover Antinous and another, titled Adonis, is about an old movie theater that now shows gay porn. His long poem The Vault, ostensibly about the gay sex club, is loaded with allusions to classical, Middle English, and 20th century literature.

His finalist award citation reads:

Elegant, plain-spoken, and unflinching, Mark Doty's poems in Fire to Fire gently invite us to share their ferocious compassion. With their praise for the world and their fierce accusation, their defiance and applause, they combine grief and glory in a music of crazy excelsis. In this generous retrospective volume a gifted young poet has become a master.

Doty teaches at the University of Houston and divides his time between New York and Provincetown. Special congratulations also to Sandy Leonard, who recognized Doty's genius before almost everyone else, in the very early 90s.

The nonfiction prize was awarded to Annette Gordon-Reed for The Hemingses of Monticello, which my bf loved. (He speculates that Sally Hemings' brother James was probably gay. James, a slave, became a master chef in Paris while Jefferson was ambassador to France, never married, demanded his freedom back in the U.S., got it, and later killed himself.) Gordon-Reed is the first black woman to win the National Book Award for nonfiction. And it's her birthday.

Fifty Best Gay Books Poll: It Tolls For Thee

After Elton has published the results of its readers poll with three YA books in the top ten and lots of lightweight reads in the second half. I love great YA fiction, yet it's absurd to claim these works -- all of which I've test-read in bookstores but none of which I've read cover to cover -- are superior to the stunning breadth of vision and infinite complexities of the omitted Nobel Prize winners and others I've listed below. Remember, the criteria for nominations was "best" not "favorite." Maybe a lot of high school students voted, and good for them for reading. It's harder to rationalize why the adult beach reads are more important than Mann or Proust or Whitman.

1. Tales of the City, Armistead Maupin
2. Maurice, E.M. Forster
3. The Front Runner, Patricia Nell Warren
4. At Swim, Two Boys, Jamie O'Neill
5. Giovanni's Room, James Baldwin
6. Hero, Perry Moore
7. The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst
8. Boy Meets Boy, David Levithan
9. A Home at the End of the World, Michael Cunningham
10. Rainbow Boys, Alex Sanchez
For numbers 11 through 50, click here.

Eight authors in the top fifty take up sixteen places, with two books each: Chabon, Cunningham, Grimsley, Hollinghurst, Renault, Round (!), Sanchez, and Sedaris.

Here's my very abbreviated list of the giants who inexcusably don't appear: Reinaldo Arenas, Christopher Bram, William S. Burroughs, Peter Cameron, Truman Capote, George Chauncey, Jean Genet, Andre Gide, Juan Goytisolo, Allan Gurganus, E. Lynn Harris, Patricia Highsmith, Stephen McCauley,Thomas Mann, Daniel Mendelsohn, Yukio Mishima, Manuel Munoz, Dale Peck, Plato, Marcel Proust, Tom Spanbauer, Benjamin Taylor, Colm Toibin, Gore Vidal, Walt Whitman, and Virginia Woolf.

Here's my longer but by no means complete list of (usually) excellent writers whose work is far more deserving than many of the titles chosen: Mike Albo, Noel Alumit, Neil Bartlett, John Boswell, Brian Bouldrey, Anthony Burgess, Stephen Chbosky, Alexander Chee, Christopher Coe, Bernard Cooper, Dennis Cooper, Samuel R. Delany, Mark Doty, David Ebershoff, Jeffrey Eugenidies, David Feinberg, Robert Ferro, Stephen Fry, Harlan Greene, Andrew Sean Greer, Joseph Hansen, James Earl Hardy, Dennis Hensley, Kief Hillsbery, Jonathan Ned Katz, Joe Keenan, Randall Kenan, Wayne Koestenbaum, Larry Kramer, Thomas Mallon, William J. Mann, Adam Mars-Jones, Mark Merlis, Michael Nava, Han Ong, David Plante, John Preston, James Purdy, Lev Raphael, David Rakoff, Paul Russell, Patrick Ryan, Geoff Ryman, Michelangelo Signorile, Bob Smith, K.M. Soehnlein, Matthew Stadler, Christos Tsiolkas, John Weir, Denton Welch, James Wilcox, John Morgan Wilson, David Wojnarowicz, and Marguerite Yourcenar.