[rating=4]
630 pages • Queer Lisboa • September 13, 2014
A brilliantly informative compendium of catalogue essays, interviews, plot summaries and images, as well as new material from Queer Lisboa.

“Queer Lisboa is not only a lens, it is a prism that allows for a detailed examination and enquiry into the nature of queer cinema, its influences and experiments and the conversations and controversies it sparks.”

[rating=3]
216 pages • Soaring Penguin Press • October 2013 [HB]
Howard Hardiman’s The Lengths explores the dark, often bleak world of former art student and rentboy Eddie and his close circle of friends, doggy-style.

“At the end of the day, whether you like Eddie or not, self-absorbed and unfocussed, escaping into a world of sex and drugs, The Lengths is a dark, sobering but rewarding read.”

[rating=4]
150 pages • The Friday Project • May 22, 2014 [PB]
24 themed chapters, with 10 numbered paragraphs, and each paragraph with exactly 120 words, Charles Lambert’s With A Zero At Its Heart is searingly honest.

“One feels oneself in the safe hands of an honest artist and consummate storyteller.”

[rating=5]
368 pages • Atlantic Books • March 06, 2014 [HB]
Damon Galgut’s remarkable novel Arctic Summer imagines the life of the great novelist E.M. Forster and the conflicts that led him to write A Passage to India.

“Forster knew when his great work had been completed, and the wonder in Damon Galgut’s Arctic Summer is that it enables the reader to feel both the triumph as well as the pain at the heart of this conflict. “

[rating=3]
224 pages • Paradise Press • February 26, 2014 [PB]
David Gee’s The Bexhill Missile Crisis is set at the start of Swinging ’60s, and looks at a crisis that explores how and why they started to swing.

“I do rather wonder if Gee is suggesting that sex and death somehow became inextricably linked in the 1960s as a result of the Crisis. It had certainly been so during the Second World War and there must have been a strong incentive to party like there was no tomorrow.”

[rating=4]
288 pages • Doubleday • January 30, 2014 [HB]
The final Tales of the City, The Days of Anna Madrigal, is as glorious as its main character. It is filled with the heart, hope and compassion of its predecessors.

“Tales of the City is the most significant series in the literature of the post-liberation era, a lionhearted, optimistic ray of light that sees the world not only for its struggles but for its possibilities.”

[rating=3]
370 pages • Max Fincher • 30 December, 2012 [PB]

Tim Bennett-Goodman found Fincher’s gay historical thriller thoroughly entertaining – an emotionally and intellectually engaging read.

“Set amongst the metropolitan circle of artists, collectors and cognoscenti of the early-19th century, this novel is not only obviously well-researched but it is also complex, intriguing and ingenious.”

[rating=4]
224 pages • Serpent’s Tail • 11 April, 2013 [PB]

True Story, by Helen Humphreys is a a poetic lament for the dead and especially for a loved-one lost far too early.

“… my grief is not that orderly, or that disciplined. It lopes ahead, stops short. I am not really able to contain it, merely follow where it leads.”

[rating=5]
424 pages • Phaidon Press Ltd • 1 April, 2013 [HB]

Art and Queer Culture is a beautifully produced & expertly written survey of the relationship between visual art & transgressive sexualities.

“Art and Queer Culture is an invaluable resource for anyone studying, or even just interested in, the history of transgressive sexualities and gender politics in the visual arts and Phaidon’s characteristically high quality production values make this a pleasure to read.”

[rating=4]
224 pages • Serif • 31 May, 2012 [PB]

Drawn and written when he was 17, Federico Garcia Lorca’s beautiful Sketches of Spain has been translated into English for the first time.

“Lorca’s murder by Nationalist gunmen during the Spanish Civil War at the age of 38 makes any reading of Lorca’s thoughts on death resonate with totemic force. His own body, never found or identified, has become part of the Spanish earth that he loved.”