The Dresser
WHILE ostensibly telling the story of the great fashion designer Cristóbal Balenciaga, Mary Blume offers a wider view of the French fashion scene and larger social significance—wider, perhaps, than some might think it deserves.
MoreBrowsing: July-August 2013
July-August 2013
Blog Posts
The Freedom Fighters’ Historian
THIS COMPENDIUM of Martin Duberman’s published writings has funneled into a single volume samples from an œuvre that includes some twenty books and numerous essays written over a period of some fifty years. The result of this distillation is a volume of 26 essays described in the book’s subtitle as “the essential historical, biographical, and autobiographical writings” of the author.
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Beyond the Celluloid Closet
Rich’s anthology is undoubtedly essential reading for GLBT cinephiles. For younger film students (straight, gay, or questioning) it sets the historical scene impeccably. For those of us who were there—and I was working as a film critic and graduate student through much of the period Rich writes about—this book creates a bizarre sense of nostalgia.
MoreThe Rite of Winter
IGOR STRAVINSKY’S Perséphone is one of the least understood works in the history of contemporary dance, music, and theater. Tamara Levitz’ Modernist Mysteries: Perséphone presents a hot, bubbling stew of Uranism, naked boys, golden torches, pédérastie, and Sapphist resistance.
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Letters We Were Never Meant to Read
One cannot help but be impressed by the number of Will Cather’s letters that survived despite such a determined effort to secure their destruction. But the 564 letters published here represent only about twenty percent of the entire body of rescued letters.
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Short Reviews
Reviews of Lies about My Family: A Memoir; Critical Queer Studies: Law, Film, and Fiction in Contemporary American Culture; Last Gleamings; and Plane Queer: Labor, Sexuality and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants
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Next on the Agenda
IRRESISTIBLE REVOLUTION collects nine essays, each an expanded and updated version of a lecture given by author Urvashi Vaid.
MoreBack on the Farm
IF IT’S TRUE what they say about everybody “having a book in them,” there’s a good chance that the book is a personal memoir. In what seems lately to be a large subset of a genre—the gay-coming-of-age literary memoir—comes Melanie Hoffert, a surprisingly Zen breath of fresh air.
More‘Living the Life’ No More
LAURA ANTONIOU, legendary author of the “Marketplace” novels about an imaginary international corporation that trains and leases out voluntary slaves, has written her first murder mystery. The author’s inside knowledge of the real-life BD/SM scene has enabled her to catalogue every shade of kink without including any explicit sex. This novel is not of the one-handed kind, but it is a racy blend of suspense and satire
MoreCould You Be the One?
THIS INTRIGUING and unusual new novel is really a collection of interconnected short stories tied together by an unnamed male narrator who spends much of his life searching for a lifetime lover, each quest ending in disappointment and regret.
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