Alice Walker’s autobiographical essays have been widely published, and the video of her life (Alice Walker) is eye-opening for its depiction of the Jim Crow world of her childhood, where there were “whites-only” and “colored” drinking fountains, restrooms, and building entrances and exits.

Beyond Shame is a unique and strangely moving account of what went right—and what went wrong—with gay life in America over the past 35 years.

In Sir John Gielgud: A Life in Letters, theatre historian Richard Mangan has compiled reams of Gielgud’s extant letters from 1912 to 1999, which offer a one-sided conversation with everyone from Martin Hensler, Gielgud’s longtime lover, to Judith Anderson and Noël Coward.

Clay’s Way by Blair Mastbaum Alyson Books. 242 pages, $12.95 BLAIR MASTBAUM’S impressive comic debut novel, set in Hawaii, presents the serious love choices of its fifteen-turning-sixteen-year-old narrator…More

BY THE TIME you’ve read the fifth novel by any writer, you begin to see his work in a way you could not with the first, which is where we stand now with Alan Hollinghurst, whose new book people have been waiting for since his last, The Line of Beauty, won the Man Booker Prize in 2004. (The Stranger’s Child has also been nominated for the Booker.) Although Hollinghurst said, after winning the Booker, that his next book would be a collection of short stories, what The Stranger’s Child does, in nearly five hundred pages, is to confirm that he is a writer who revels in the long form.