In Thomas Marino’s oddly titled memoir, Tomorrow May Be Too Late, one might expect to discover handsome lovers with suspenseful careers and personal secrets dashing to expensive rendezvous at exotic locales and engaging in sizzling, passionate sex.

To a degree, that’s what Marino delivers in this sincere but long winded epic of his ten-month affair at the age of twenty-one with another man — there are provocative and questionable jobs and plenty of personal secrets and lots of showers and hot sex, though the luxurious globe-trotting adventures take place between New Jersey and Philadelphia nightclubs and restaurants circa 1988, and the extravagance comes with a price tag of quibbles over spending too much money.

A more appropriate title for Marino’s exposé of falling in love with the “good-looking bad boy” might have been “Lessons I Learned from that Awful Affair,” and what Marino details is what many gay men have also experienced at some point in their lives:  Getting into bed with the wrong guy.

But let’s start at the beginning, which is where Marino starts, when handsome Tom meets handsome Tom: Marino meets Tom Shaw at a New Jersey club.  Marino is separating from his wife and inching his way out into accepting his homosexuality and having brief affairs with other guys. He is instantly smitten with his attractive new boyfriend.  Within days the two men are inseparable and talking about moving in together.

Marino, a banker by day, is also a part-time stripper on weekends, and he strives hard to bring some nobility to this latter, questionable profession in his passages detailing his work at bachelorette and birthday parties, though his credibility suffers somewhat from his own narcissism and self-indulgence, as he and his acquaintances constantly comment on his attractiveness page after page.

Shaw, too, is apparently a looker, but instead of suffering from Marino’s flaws of youthful innocence, naiveté, and sincerity, he is a drifter and a hustler-in-training, setting up scam after scam and initiating a relationship with Marino, who finds himself financially liable for Shaw’s every compliment.

Money, money, money seems to be at the root of all evils in this hot-sex relationship, though it is clear that Marino is not telling the entire story about Shaw, nor is he sugar-coating his own behavior.  As Shaw disappears for free time from the relationship to “go driving” and clear his mind, Marino engages in his own bad behavior, more hot sex with more hot men as well as a dalliance with a female co-worker.

All of this is detailed in diary-like entries with prose that is clean, concise, and minimal, and which makes this a remarkably swift read, given the length of the work.  On an emotional scale of one to ten, Marino’s residual burn from Shaw is about a four or five — there have clearly been other nasty affairs recorded that are much more disastrous than this — but I make no bones about professing that this book was an addictive weekend read.  I could not put it down once I started it — it was like knowing a train crash was imminent and wanting to see who survived and how — particularly as I began to see many elements of my own youthful mistakes in both Tom and Tom’s behavior.
——
TOMORROW MAY BE TOO LATE
by Thomas Marino
Tommy100
ISBN: 9780578008233
Paperback, $24.00, 388 pages

Related posts:

1. ‘In the Closet, Under the Bed’ by Lee Thomas
2. ‘The Closet Under The Bed’ by Lee Thomas (Trailer)
3. ‘What We Remember’ by Michael Thomas Ford

Check out this short film based on Kathe Koja’s new historical novel Under The Poppy, out next month from Small Beer Press. The story takes place in Brussels during the 1870s and according to press materials, readers can expect “naughty puppets”, “loose women”, and “epic drama”[!!!]

This is easily the most exciting trailer we’ve seen all year. Directed by Diane Cheklich the short film combines shadow puppets by Detroit-based visual artist Al Bogdan, three real-life actors, and music by Joe Stacey in a world made up of beautiful motion graphics. 

Check out these behind-the-scenes factoids via Bogdan’s vimeo:

Factoid 1: The puppet stage show had up to four people operating the puppets using rods… and there was a ton of laughing, as you might expect.

Factoid 2: We couldn’t get all the actors to show when shooting the final live scene, so we shot the center female on her own and composited her with the other two actors.

Factoid 3: Joe wrote the music as soon as Kathe described the project, before we’d started making the movie. We liked it so much we fit the movie to the music.

Visit underthepoppy.com for more information about the project.

Related posts:

1. ‘My Dog Tulip’ [Trailer]
2. [Trailer] Jeri Estes ‘Stilettos and Steel’
3. ‘Leave the Light On’ (Trailer)

When I initially encountered the cover of David McConnell’s second novel, The Silver Hearted, I was riveted by the image of an illuminated ship, isolated and askew in a vast river. My eyes were then drawn top center, to a tiny quote from Edmund White, “…a perfect work of art.” The ultra-fine print beckoned, challenged, “Come hither. I dare you to disagree with this American master.”

It is safe to assume Alyson Books was elated, at the very least, to have a literary icon provide this incredible blurb. No doubt, these seventeen letters will sell far more than seventeen copies.

But I wonder if the marketing department anticipated the degree to which these five small words tempted this reader (and likely others) to examine the novel in search of the reasons behind Mr. White’s superlative. It is possible they engineered it.

Only a few paragraphs in, McConnell gracefully transported me to a world so entirely engaging and captivating, there was no room for even Edmund White’s praise to shadow my transcendence. This novel’s world is concurrently historic and futuristic, familiar and foreign, gentle and gory, masculine and feminine. It is a world where women once were but now have little presence. They are remembered, but are not needed or pined for.  It is a world where straight men aren’t threatened by, nor do they threaten, men who love other men.

The plot of The Silver Hearted is simple to summarize: a man is at the end of his rope. In a time of war, he must secretly and safely usher 24 blue boxes filled with 36,000 silver dollars—other men’s silver dollars, down a river.

His existence depends on his success at this task. It is a quest with obstacles, told by a most linguistic and literary narrator.

It is not the plot of the novel that grips tight and squeezes relentlessly. It could be argued that the plot is secondary.

McConnell set his novel in a fascinating and furious world. His ability to build passionate empathy for even the most minute and least likeable characters drew me in. The craft with which he rendered me thoroughly invested in situations and circumstances (ones that in less skilled hands would send me back to the bookstore) kept me reading. The luxurious language with which he told this story catapulted me into immediate fandom.

I read nonstop, suspended in time, in an imaginary city that McConnell has drawn with elaborate and vibrant specificity. While there are no factual reasons for finding this story’s settings or situations pleasing, every moment I lived in The Silver Hearted’s confines brought visual, intellectual, and emotional satisfaction.

I resented and regretted reaching McConnell’s final word. So I rebelled, and read it a second and third time—as befits any perfect work of art. I highly recommend you do likewise.
——
THE SILVER HEARTED
by David McConnell
Alyson Books
ISBN: 9781593501402
Paperback w/ French Flaps, 230 pages, $14.95

Related posts:

1. Event: David McConnell @ B&N (w/ Edmund White)
2. Carla Trujillo and David McConnell Join Lambda Literary Foundation’s Board of Trustees
3. ‘Silver Lake’ by Peter Gadol

I did not know John Stahle well.  Sometimes I wonder who among us really did.  But a picture has been forming since I learned of his death.  Reading back over the emails John and I exchanged the past year, to the handful of times we met—an outing to the Noguchi Museum and Socrates Sculpture garden, a Wilde Boys gathering, dinner at a Chelsea diner—I was struck by his generosity and wit and ability to “dish.”  Qualities reaffirmed by the numerous tributes I’ve read from those who also had the pleasure of meeting John.  And now after recent email exchanges with his sister, his life has taken shape for me like a kaleidoscope, a fitting image given John’s kaleidoscopic vision when promoting the literary and visual arts.

Who was John?  John Stahle was a writer, photographer, graphic designer and the editor of Ganymede, a journal based in New York City devoted to gay men’s art, literature and culture. Ganymede ran for seven issues, placing features from prominent queer writers alongside stunning portfolios of black & white photography, and devoting lengthy sections to up-and-coming queer writers and poets.  The journal spawned two anthologies: one devoted to the poetry of the first six issues, Ganymede Poets, One; and one devoted to the fiction from the first six issues, Ganymede Stories, One.  John published two books of his own work: Your Face Tomorrow (2010), a chapbook of poems; and I Was Like (2008), which included micro-fiction, essays, photographs and poems.

John was born in 1950 and was the youngest of three children.  His father was an Army Air Corp pilot in the Air Force, flying B-17s with the 15th AF in Italy during WWII.  As with most military families, they were often relocated from base to base around the country, traveling in an old Kaiser and pulling a trailer (in a time before air conditioning and interstate freeways!).  John was born in Austin, TX, and subsequently lived in Tampa, FL; Shreveport, LA (a period in which he wanted to be a nun, tying a towel around his head); Columbus, OH (his Zorro phase from the hit TV show, dressing as the man in black); Madrid, Spain, where John stayed until 10th grade, when his father transferred to the Westover AFB in Chicopee, MA.  He finished out high school at Cathedral High in Springfield, MA in 1968 and went to Fordham University for college where he studied Philosophy.

John graduated from Fordham in 1972, the same year his father died of pancreatic cancer, and rented the apartment in which he would live the rest of his life, up on 105th Street.  He had post-grad training in graphic design at the School of the Visual Arts here in New York, and held a series of high-profile jobs in design, first as a graphic designer for the Boys Club of America National Headquarters, then as Art Director for Planned Parenthood National Headquarters, and as Design Director for WNYC (New York’s National Public Radio station).  In 1986 John went freelance and provided graphic design services for numerous non-profits, arts organizations, publishers, and self-published authors.

John died in April.  I heard the news in May from a mutual family friend, Robert C. Neville (“Bob”), Professor of Philosophy, Religion, and Theology at BU. Bob officiated at my sister’s wedding two years ago, and taught John many years earlier at Fordham. When I heard the news I found few others who had heard.  And when I broke the news I was overwhelmed with the response.  With the help of two fabulous gentlemen, Bryan Borland and Philip Clark, we made a tribute site for John where people could go to pay their respects: www.rememberingjohnstahle.com.  You will find many tributes from some of the poets and writers who most recently knew him through his Ganymede enterprise.  You will find tributes from emerging visual artists who knew John when he was more active in the art gallery scene in the years prior to Ganymede.  And this seems fitting, that even in death, John is doing what he did so well in life: introducing writers to each other, writers and artists to each other, creating connections and community.  And yet even with all the tributes, discovering traits like his love for cute boys and opera, to “dish” and dine, to attend openings and exhibits and salons, to his lifelong friendship and collaborations with the art historian Irma Jaffe, the man still remains a bit of a mystery to me.  A bit like those images in a kaleidoscope.

I’m not the only one who has thought of a kaleidoscope when reflecting on John.  To quote my new friend Philip Clark, John’s “mind was a kaleidoscope, and his intelligence a tall ship always going towards another fantastic shore.”  And was it.  Derived from the Ancient Greek, the word kaleidoscope literally means “observer of beautiful forms,” and what better word sums up John’s vision.  In his own work, in promoting the work of others, in the reviews and photographs and poems and stories he selected for Ganymede, in his desire to cultivate taste in his readers and viewers, to not only celebrate us, but through the celebration and juxtaposition of our work, make us all better individual kaleidoscopes, we owe much to John.

——

Come help us celebrate John and Ganymede at a memorial tribute on Saturday, September 18th, 2:30pm in the Lerner Auditorium (Room 301) at the LGBT Center, 208 West 13th Street here in NYC.  Check out www.rememberingjohnstahle.com for more details.  You will find many tributes posted there and are more than welcome to post your own.

And though the Ganymede site and John’s website have expired, his storefront is still up on Lulu where you can purchase back issues of Ganymede, the Ganymede anthologies of poetry and fiction, and the two books of John’s own work.  For those interested in the tribute issue Ganymede Unfinished edited by Bryan Borland, purchasing information is available here.

Sincere thanks to John’s sister, Kathy Stahle Drummey, for providing details about John’s early life and career, and to Bryan Borland and Philip Clark for helping me ensure John’s legacy lives on.

Related posts:

1. ‘Role Models’ by John Waters
2. Interview: John Rechy
3. ‘Spider Season’ by John Morgan Wilson

The first queer book I ever read was A Density of Souls by Christopher Rice.

At the time of the reading, I was just about to turn fifteen and was growing increasingly frustrated with my sexuality. When I got on the bus and prepared for the ride ahead, I cracked the book open and began to read.

Halfway through, I realized something, then came to accept it without a doubt in my mind—I was gay, pure and simple, and there was nothing to be ashamed of.

A Density of Souls is, literally, the book that changed my life.

——

Kody Boye was born and raised in Southeastern Idaho. He is the author of the forthcoming novels Sunrise: The Revised and Expanded Edition and Pretty Things, as well as the short story collection Amorous Things. He currently lives and writes in Austin, Texas. KodyBoye.com

Related posts:

1. Book Buzz: Call for Submissions
2. What if Jesus Were Gay?
3. Links: 20 Classics, Librarians Fight Back, & Queer ComicCon

In her poem “The Book,” Mary Oliver writes, of lilies in a neighbor’s yard:

You could not help but see
that to be beautiful is also to be simple
and brief; is to rise up and be glorious, and then vanish.

I thought of these lines while reading Michael Cunningham’s new book, By Nightfall, a novel about the challenges of finding—and holding on to—beauty, and about the importance of resisting death; a force that beautiful people seem drawn to and beautiful things resist.

In the book’s opening scene, 44-year-old Peter Harris and his wife, Rebecca, are marooned in a cab in the Manhattan night. They are on their way uptown to a chic art-world party, but their progress has been slowed by a very New York accident: a white Mercedes has collided with a carriage horse, snarling up traffic. And so, the novel begins in the slightly freakish presence of death and, when a homeless man is likened to “stately, plump Buck Mulligan,” in the shadow of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Fear not, though, this is no Ulysses. There’s nothing confusing about Cunningham’s propulsive prose; the references are occasional and inessential, the stylistic borrowings limited to occasional parenthetical asides and discursive interior monologues. Still, Cunningham’s New York is as intensely wrought as Joyce’s Dublin; it is a crowded, haunted city that contains both people who are truly exceptional and people whose job is to enable or to judge who is worthy of that description.

Peter and Rebecca represent aspirational New York success—he is an art dealer, she edits a literary magazine; they live in a loft on Mercer Street—and yet there is something gnawing at him. Partly, it’s the looming presentiment of death—a friend’s cancer diagnosis, a queasy stomach that he worries might be more than mere indigestion, the possibility of more terrorist attacks—and partly it’s the one thing that is more frightening than death, perhaps because it’s less inevitable: the possibility of failure. His life’s mission is to seek out the eternal. On a visit to the Met, he is drawn to “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,” Damien Hirst’s shark preserved in a tank of formaldehyde, and a Tiepolo bronze in which a young boy “continues banging on his tambourine.”

Peter stands at the crossroads of life. Married for nearly 22 years, a gallery owner for 15, he is starting to feel “a small sense of disappointment, a hint of actual defeat.” He is approaching a point where he might have to accept that his potential has expired. His comfortable routine is jolted when Rebecca’s much younger brother, Ethan, comes to stay. Known in the family as “Mizzy,” the mistake, he is a beautiful, charming 23-year-old who was once an impossibly promising child and is now a restless young man with a drug problem.

Ethan’s arrival unsettles Peter, leading him to question everything. It begins with his relationship to beauty. As a taste-maker, Peter’s job is to find new artistic talents and to promote their work—for the sake of his reputation and his bank balance, he must distinguish the truly remarkable and lasting from the fleeting also-rans. “He’s the servant of beauty, he’s not beauty itself,” Cunningham writes. But when Ethan moves into the loft, Peter seems to lose his sense of certainty about art and success and perhaps even about his own sexuality.

Mizzy stirs memories of Peter’s brother Matthew, another dazzlingly special boy, who died too young, succumbing to AIDS 25 years ago, along with his lover and all of his friends. In Peter’s memory, “Matthew was (okay, maybe he was) handsomer and smarter and more gifted than any of them; Matthew whose comeliness and grace not only didn’t save him but (horrible thought) helped to annihilate him.” Is it this loss that drives Peter to “help, if he can, in the procreation of something marvelous, something that will endure, something that will tell the world … that we mattered not only in what we left behind but in our proud if perishable flesh”?

In the company of the directionless Mizzy, Peter heads out to bucolic Connecticut, to the estate of an eccentric patron of the arts who may offer a home, in the middle of a “faux wild” English garden, for an expensive and eccentric piece by Rupert Groff, an artist who may represent one last chance of success for Peter’s career. Peter isn’t quite sure what he will do if he fails to get Groff, “and he settles, quite possibly for good … into a career of determined semidefeat, a champion of the overlooked and the almost-but-not-quite.”

But the piece, an odd marriage of ancient and modern, fits beautifully in the garden, leaving a sense that despite all the upheaval, things might just work out for Peter.

Or, as the Mary Oliver poem continues, perhaps beauty is not in:

the usual daily foolishness that comes to so little
so far as the real things matter: eternity,
the unseen, the unrecognized, the filling of the heart
with goodness.

——
BY NIGHTFALL:
A Novel
By Michael Cunningham
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Hardcover, 256 pages, $25

Related posts:

1. Michael Cunningham discusses his new book [10/12-LA]
2. ‘What We Remember’ by Michael Thomas Ford
3. ‘The More I Owe You’ by Michael Sledge

For your reading pleasure today, two new poems by Arisa White.

out of line

She’s yelling into my ear.
She didn’t know I waited for someone
to test the nature I was born into.

It is easy to bring her to the floor,
slap her for every day I denied this rage,
for the ways she rendered me invisible.

It is easy and I understand why
beating another’s will is needed
so earth and air can be mine.

Freedom and not-a-single care,
she stops me dead in my tracks:
Hit me, do it, go ahead, do it . . .

Look to see if she is my mother
and there is nothing free in me.

Loss sits difficult in my chest,
its edges mismatched in breath,
I’m wilted and unloved.

See myself pool soft sounds
to drown the gaggle in my head.
(No season takes them south.)

My phone lines burdened and ruined,
I call and barely hear myself
until my fist is held midair.

Mammalian large, continuous I wail
to the ground, I can’t move in grief.
Cry until I’m parched by it.

beechnut

A Charlie horse passes through the wound
set years ago. Winter in the mountains, the beech
twisted and it was paper we could use. In that
classic way, seen on TV, wanting one day to be
that girl, you revealed your Swiss army knife
and the bark knew we would. Maybe we scared
away the owls who may have nested there
and everything was the perfect we loved. Our
initials traveled to heart, aged our presence
to diaphanous, to shirr between thought and
sometimes we move on. What is planted is
resilient; its shell grows spines, the nut a sweet
portion, hints close to satisfaction and its how I
come to understand our touch. Woodwinds have
memory; I haven’t advanced beyond Twinkle Twinkle
Little Star, and the tapping on the streetlamp was often
opposite notes we shared. We engineered shepherds
to herd our swords, Oakland felt similar disharmony
and built a lake to meet the need for breath and matter.
Water finds scent and apology and people to beach
on its cusp. Reminds the heart there are summer
dresses to be worn, and twirling that happens in them.

ARISA WHITE is a Cave Canem fellow and holds a MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is author of the chapbook Disposition for Shininess. She has received residencies, fellowships, and/or scholarships from Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Hedgebrook, Atlantic Center for the Arts, University of Western Michigan, Fine Arts Work Center, and Bread Loaf Writers’s Conference. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2005, her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and is featured on the CD WORD with the Jessica Jones Quartet. She currently lives in Oakland, CA.

To submit your work for publication on LambdaLiterary.org, please see our Call for Submissions or email jameson@lambdaliterary.org.

Related posts:

1. Gaywise FESTival 2010 – London’s LGBT cross art festival for all
2. [Trailer] ‘Inferno (a poet’s novel)’ by Eileen Myles
3. 3 Upcoming Kay Ryan Events

September signals the start of the official fall book season, one of the busiest times of the year for publishers and authors alike.

Some exciting fiction titles this month include Monique Truong’s Bitter In the Mouth (Random House)—we interviewed Truong last month—and Yield (Kensington), the exciting debut from Lee Houck.

In nonfiction, I’m personally excited about The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (Pantheon), a brilliant collection of James Baldwin essays edited by Lambda Award Winner Randall Kenan and Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation (Seal), an updated classic edited by Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman (both Lambda Award Finalists).

BIO/MEMOIR
	1. A Life Like Other People’s by Alan Bennett Farrar, Straus and Giroux Alan Bennett recalls his childhood and the lives of two aunts, Kathleen and Myra; as his mother’s mental health fails, Bennett uncovers a long-held family secret in this humorous autobiography.
	2. The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss by Edmund de Waal Farrar, Straus and Giroux From Renoir to Rilke, Edmund de Waal traces five generations of Ephrussis family history by chronicling the story of a series of Japanese mini wood and ivory carvings called netsuke.
	3. My Dog Tulip by J.R. Ackerley NYRB Classics J.R. Ackerly’s memoir of his 16-year relationship with the love of his life, a German shepherd named Tulip, is reissued in time for the release of a feature film by Paul and Sandra Fierlinger. (Movie Tie-In)
	4. Crossing the Barriers: The Autobiography of Allan H. Spear by Allan H. Spear, forward by Barney Frank, afterward John Milton University of Minnesota Press This is the memoir of a prominent Minnesota politician and one of the country’s first openly gay elected officials, with John Milton filling in the details of Allen H. Spear’s final political accomplishments.
YOUNG ADULT/CHILDREN
	5. I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth The Trip. by John Donovan Flux Now The 40th anniversary edition of a groundbreaking classic young adult novel, which centers around a 13-year-old, his dysfunctional parents, his dog, and his evolving friendship with another boy from school.
	6. The Perfect Family by Kathryn Shay Bold Strokes Books A 17-year-old Jamie Davidson’s coming out throws his family into turmoil, until the the family is able reconnect and redeem each other.
	7. Z by Michael Thomas Ford Harper Teen Reality is muddled as a virtual-reality zombie-hunting game goes from the screen to streets, in a post-zombie world that is haunted by a suspicious new drug named Z.
FICTION
	8. Bitter In the Mouth by Monique Truong Random House A young synesthete, who can taste words, returns home to Boiling Springs, North Carolina after many years in search of identity, only to uncover family secrets and the truth about her origins. (Read our interview here)
	9. Yield by Lee Houck Kensington Amidst a violent and gritty Manhattan, Simon, twenty-something part-time hustler, part-time hospital worker, searches for meaning, love, and healing with the help of friends in Houck’s anticipated debut.
	10. Room by Emma Donoghue Little, Brown and Company From the point of view of 5-year-old Jack, Donaghue tells the story of a mother and a son, both kidnapping victims who live in a 11-sq-foot soundproofed cell and their escape to the “outside.” (Man Booker Shortlist)
	11. Children of the Sun by Max Schaefer Soft Skull The lives of two gay men intersect in this shocking debut that chronicles the growth and decline of the National movement in Britain from the 70’s to the present. (Green Carnation Longlist)
	12. Queer by William S. Burroughs; ed. by Oliver Harris Penguin The autobiographical novel follows William Lee’s pursuit of sex from bar to bar in the American expatriate scene of Mexico City in the 1950’s. Written in 1952, but not published till 1985. (25th-Anniversary Edition)
NONFICTION
	13. Gender Outlaws The Next Generation Edited by Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman Seal Press Essays, commentary, comic art, and conversation from a diverse group of trans-spectrum people who live barrier-breaking lives, edited by two Lambda Award finalists.
	14. The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings by James Baldwin, ed. by Randall Kenan Pantheon Essays, articles, polemics, reviews, and interviews by James Baldwin that have never before appeared in book form, with an introduction by Lambda Award winning author Randall Kenan.
	15. Queer Twin Cities by Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project University of Minnesota Press The Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project collective offers a critical analysis of the queer history, politics, and spaces of the Twin Cities told though oral history, archival research, and ethnography.
ROMANCE & EROTICA
	16. The Glass Minstrel by Hayden Thorne Cheyenne Publishing Historical novel of two 19th-century Bavarian fathers brought together by the deaths of their eldest sons, while 15-year-old Jacob struggles with an obsession with a traveling Englishman.
	17. Match Maker by Alan Chin Dreamspinner Press A shamed professional tennis player’s life becomes endangered when he attempts to redeem his career and save his fragile relationship by coaching his protege to a Grand Slam championship win.
	18. Lessons in Power: Cambridge Fellows Mysteries, Book 4 by Charlie Cochrane Samhain Publishing Two Cambridge lovers are suspected of murder when an investigation reveals the victim to be one of the men’s sexual abusers from years ago.
	19. Body Language by Kenna White Bella Books Bestselling author Kenna White takes readers on a breathless journey through the beauties of Venice and the romance of a lifetime.
	20. Best of Best Gay Erotica 3 by Richard Labonté Cleis Press A collection of the most daring stories from the past five years of the Best Gay Erotica series, including stories from Simon Sheppard, Charlie Vásquez, Alana Noêl Voth, Tim Doody, and Thom Wolf.
MYSTERY & CRIME
	22. Cockeyed A Donald Strachey Mystery by Richard Stevenson MLR Press The eleventh Strachey novel is part mystery, part screwball comedy, and entirely serious in its exploration of the multiple ways of being gay in America.
	23. Fever of the Bone: by Val Mcdermid Harper Collins The murder of teenager Jennifer Maidment marks the start of a chilling campaign, targeting a seeming unconnected group of young people who have been groomed by the killer via a social networking site.
	24. Water Mark by J.M. Redmann Bold Strokes The sixth book in the Lambda Award-winning Micky Knight mystery series, Redmann’s P.I. uncovers a web of crime and murder that spans generations in pre-Katrina New Orleans.
SPECULATIVE
	25. Mangames by Denis Chabot-Martin StarBooks Press Through his background as a journalist, Denis-Martin Chabot relays this story adapted from actual news stories of sexual predators in Montreal.
	26. Amorous Things by Kody Boye Library of Horror Press In this collection of short stories, Kody Boye explores the world of affection and the lives impacted by the world’s most simple emotion: love.

Related posts:

1. Book Buzz: September 2010
2. New In August
3. Kenny Fries at Access Living Arts and Culture Project, Chicago

It’s nice to see Robert Kirby back on the comic book scene, both as an editor (Boy Trouble) and an artist (Curbside Boys). His intro to Three explains the power of three: three muses, Three Musketeers, three wishes, beginning, middle and end, and queer as a three dollar bill. It’s a nice jump into the work of the artists in this debut issue, and what looks to be an intriguing series.

Eric Orner (The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green) opens with a strong story that’s both travelogue and mystery, “Weekends Abroad.”  The tale is part of, as the artist explains, “the last couple of years, which I’ve spent living, working and being illiterate in Israel…” Although he lives in Jerusalem, he tries to escape on weekends to Tel Aviv, where the attitude is less uptight. He wanders around exploring the city and its cruising scene at night. When he discovers weird vertical graffiti, he images up possible guys who might have wrote it. He hooks up with a guy, the date goes sour, but not the night; he wanders across the beach, back to the hotel, and through the dark city.  Another night he discovers more graffiti on a park bench. A shriek in the evening terrifies him, until he realizes it’s only a rooster. At the end of the strip he stumbles on the graffiti writer, whose identity only leads to more questions.

Orner’s strip captures the feeling of being a stranger and exploring a country where even the most mundane things seem new. His art shows the landscape the words don’t describe, taking the reader along as a vicarious traveler. This strong story made me want to read more; Orner’s eye for intriguing detail would make him a good travel host in any city.

Joey Sayers’ (Just So You Know) comic is a fun riff on the frustration of not being able to use the bathroom when you most need to go. She’s at her job as a gardener with co-workers, but they feel shy about asking the client if they can use the bathroom. The client grants her the privilege, but not without asking, “Did you flush?”

“You should have told her you left a big turd in there,” an incredulous co-worker suggests. This is lighter than Sayers’ recent books, which deal adeptly with many of the difficult issues that arise around transexuality.

Robert Kirby’s comic is a travelogue too, of sorts, only this one resurrects his character Drew (from Curbside Boys) in a quest to find himself. Tired of being ignored by his ex-film studies professor boyfriend Mitch, Drew wanders off into New York City, wondering if he could ever disappear. He remembers as a kid, hiding in trees or under the sink as a kid, with no one aware of his whereabouts. Swallowed by the city, he feels his identity wash away, and the possibilities open up. He could be anyone.

A confrontation with a three-legged dog in the park makes Drew consider the nature of handicaps and returns Drew back to reality. Back at the apartment, readers see Drew really did disappear; Mitch hasn’t even noticed he was gone.

Although the Drew in this comic is young, the story seems one of those midlife realizations, about how fate foists difficult life situations on people. For both Drew and the three-legged dog even disappearing won’t change an ill partner or bring back a missing limb.

A final note, like Kirby’s Boy Trouble collections, it’s great to see another collection that allows LGBTQ artists to explore issues including but not limited to sexuality. Check out this comic triumvirate, which promises to provide a forum for both these talented artists, and others to come.

Eric Orner

Joey Sayers

Rob Kirby

——
THREE
Debut Issue
Featuring comics by Joey Alison Sayers, Eric Orner, and Robert Kirby
edited by Robert Kirby
Robert Kirby Comics
Paperback, $6.25

Related posts:

1. ‘Martyrs & Monsters’ by Robert Dunbar
2. Alison Bechdel, Howard Cruse and others on display @ Giovanni’s Room
3. First dispatch from 2010 Writers’ Retreat for Emerging LGBT Voices

The Green Carnation Longlist 2010—”a new prize for works of fiction and memoirs by gay men”—was announced last week. We don’t know too much about the award yet, but we’ve sent emails to the chair and will report back soon. The list includes a few well-known Americans—Armistead Maupin, Edmund White and James Hannaham—who are also previous Lambda Award finalists. Maupin was a finalist in 1989 for Sure of You. White won a Lambda in 1988 for The Beautiful Room Is Empty and again in 1993 for Genet (not to mention his 5 additional nominations). While Hannaham was a finalist for God Says No this year.

The award-winning thriller writer Christopher Fowler is the only author listed twice. I was excited to see Christos Tsiolkas and Damon Galgut on this list since both are longlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize. This is ironic since The Green Carnation was originally imagined as a sort of play on words that spoofed the Booker (Man Fooker Prize). The Canadian Douglas Coupland is also included. Did you know he has 338,948 followers on Twitter? Rupert Smith (aka James Lear) has 80. But who’s counting?

• Generation A by Douglas Coupland (Windmill Books)
• Bryant and May Off the Rails by Christopher Fowler (Doubleday)
• Paperboy by Christopher Fowler (Doubleday)
• In A Strange Room by Damon Galgut (Atlantic Books)+
• God Says No by James Hannaham (McSweeney’s)*
• London Triptych by Jonathan Kemp (Myriad Editions)
• Mary Ann in Autumn by Armistead Maupin (Doubleday)*
• Children of the Sun by Max Schaefer (Granta)
• Man’s World by Rupert Smith (Arcadia Books)**
• The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas (Tuskar Rock Press)+
• City Boy by Edmund White (Bloomsbury)*

*Lambda Award Finalists
+Man Booker Longlist
**Rupert Smith is a Lambda Finalist as James Lear

Related posts:

1. ALA's 2010 Stonewall Book Awards announced
2. 2010 Monette-Horwitz Trust Award Recipients Announced
3. Sacchi Green Gets Speculative