For readers who yearn more for good dish than spiritual pondering, it does not hurt that Plante’s “connections” are of the very best kind: Germaine Greer, Phillip Roth, David Hockney, to name a few. … read more

What begins as an atmospheric bildungsroman set in a mythically ahistorical New York City morphs by slow degrees into a harrowing meditation on otherness and the redemptive possibilities of survival and friendship… read more

The palimpsest of revolution and cosmopolitanism that overlays Picano’s recollections is of course utterly appropriate to the post-Stonewall years he describes… read more

James Magruder’s Let Me See It  (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press) is a collection often interlocking stories that follow the lives of Elliott Biddler and Tom Amelio, first cousins who grow up separately in places like Kansas City and Chicago and find each other as they come of age as gay men in the 1980s. Much… read more

“Music was an escape for me when self-expression was, at least so I thought, a punishable offense.”… read more

“Writing [An Honest Ghost] was very much like meditating: it required focus and steady effort, but also a kind of empty wandering, allowing the sentences to drift into place.”… read more

Whitaker’s novel is preoccupied with the mimetic impulse, the mind’s habit of hiding from itself and the possibility of change amongst the furniture of the past…. read more

These stories describe the moments of adrenaline and gut instinct that can mark an imperiled adolescent’s first break for something better or set a course for a lifetime on the skids…. read more