Review of the Year: Men’s Reading List
Gay’s the Word Christmas Books Guide – The Men’s Reading List
The Stranger’s Child
Alan Hollinghurst
576 pages • Picador • June, 2011 • £16 [HB]
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Signed Copies rrp £20 – our price £16 (Fiction)
‘Masterful… There is a huge cleverness to the book at a structural and, as it were, managerial level. Characters are named with an aptness which is light-footed and unswervingly accurate… Hollinghurst, as ever, is quietly brilliant about architecture, both in the specific sense of a cultural discourse about buildings, and the broader sense of how people behave in different kinds of place… there is something symphonic about [the novel s] wholeness.’ – Daily Telegraph
In the late summer of 1913 the aristocratic young poet Cecil Valance comes to stay at ‘Two Acres’, the home of his close Cambridge friend George Sawle. The weekend will be one of excitements and confusions for all the Sawles, but it is on George’s sixteen-year-old sister Daphne that it will have the most lasting impact, when Cecil writes her a poem which will become a touchstone for a generation, an evocation of an England about to change for ever.
Linking the Sawle and Valance families irrevocably, the shared intimacies of this weekend become legendary events in a larger story, told and interpreted in different ways over the coming century, and subjected to the scrutiny of critics and biographers with their own agendas and anxieties. In a sequence of widely separated episodes we follow the two families through startling changes in fortune and circumstance.
At the centre of this often richly comic history of sexual mores and literary reputation runs the story of Daphne, from innocent girlhood to wary old age. Around her Hollinghurst draws an absorbing picture of an England constantly in flux. As in The Line of Beauty, his impeccably nuanced exploration of changing taste, class and social etiquette is conveyed in deliciously witty and observant prose. Exposing our secret longings to the shocks and surprises of time, The Stranger’s Child is an enthralling novel from one of the finest writers in the English language.
Mary Ann In Autumn
Armistead Maupin
368 pages • Black Swan • September, 2011 • £7.99
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The brilliant new episode from the magical Tales of the City series in paperback.
Twenty years have passed since Mary Ann Singleton left her husband and child in San Francisco to pursue her dream of a television career in New York. Now, a pair of personal calamities has driven her back to the city of her youth and into the arms of her oldest friend, Michael “Mouse” Tolliver, a gay gardener happily ensconced with his much-younger husband.
Mary Ann finds temporary refuge in the couple’s backyard cottage, where, at the unnerving age of fifty-seven, she licks her wounds and takes stock of her mistakes. Soon, with the help of Facebook and a few old friends, she begins to re-engage with life, only to confront fresh terrors when her speckled past comes back to haunt her in a way she could never have imagined.
Over three decades in the making, Armistead Maupin’s legendary Tales of the City series rolls into a new age, still sassy, irreverent and curious, and still exploring the boundaries of the human experience with insight, compassion and mordant wit.
‘Gay’s the Word, to my mind, is the fountainhead of queer literature in Britain. I am deeply grateful that these pioneers fought so hard for our right to tell – and read – our own stories.’ Armistead Maupin
twentysix
Jonathan Kemp
134 pages • Myriad Editions • November, 2011 • £9.99 [PB]
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Crafted around twenty-six extraordinary erotic encounters, this highly charged work is a powerful meditation on the pursuit of pleasure. In each chapter, titled after a letter of the alphabet, an anonymous narrator details his experiences, travelling to cruising grounds and sex clubs, exploring the boundaries of sex, desire, pleasure, and the body, while reflecting on the limits of language and the act of writing. In the tradition of Georges Bataille, Kathy Acker and Jean Genet, these pieces take us to places language doesn’t often go. Kemp powerfully stages a series of anonymous encounters, describing the relentless pursuit of sexual pleasure with luminous intensity, while at the same time facing the impossibility of capturing the moments he describes. This is a bold and challenging work, unashamedly sensual and searching. Kemp beautifully counterpoises explicit description with a searing interrogation of the extreme measures taken in the quest for sexual fulfillment.
Jonathan Kemp teaches creative writing, literature and queer theory. He also DJs. Originally from the North, he has lived in London for twenty years. His first novel London Triptych (also highly recommended and available to order) won the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Green Carnation Prize. Myriad will publish his third novel, Hannah Rose, in 2012.
Still Side by Side
Mioki
120 pages • Bruno Gmunder • November, 2011 • £18.99 [HB]
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In Side by Side comic artist Mioki introduced readers into the lives of Evan and Rick. Best friends since childhood, they stumbled right into a hot love affair which each other. Meanwhile, the two cuties live together in the city. The fact that both of them have sex with other men from time to time – whether together or alone – doesn’t harm their relationship. Love can be so beautiful. Very sexy.
Gypsy Boy on the Run
Mikey Walsh
320 pages • Hodder Paperbacks • November, 2011 • £6.99 [PB]
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‘It was a revelation. Moving, terrifying, funny and brilliant. I shall never forget it – an amazing achievement’ (on Gypsy Boy) – Stephen Fry
Gypsy Boy on the Run picks up from where Gypsy Boy left off, and tells the gripping, page-turning story of Mikey’s battle to escape the Romany gypsy camp he grew up on.
After centuries of persecution Gypsies are wary of outsiders and if you choose to leave, you can never come back. Torn between his family and his heart, Mikey struggles to come to terms with his ancient inheritance and dreams of finding a place where he can really belong.
He eventually finds the courage to run away from the camp and from all he knows, and quickly discovers life on the outside world isn’t all he expected. After learning his father had put a contract out on his life and that he was now being hunted down by gangs of gypsy thugs determined to claim their reward, Mikey realises that his life will never be the same again.
On the Run is a coming-of-age story that sees Mikey come to terms with his sexuality and his past and start to build a new life for himself and find a place to finally call home.
The Secret Historian
Justin Spring
478 pages • Farrar Straus Giroux • July, 2011 • £12.99 [PB]
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The life and times of Samuel Stewart; professor, tattoo artist and sexual renegade.
Drawn from the secret, never-before-seen diaries, journals, and sexual records of the novelist, poet, and university professor Samuel M. Steward, Secret Historian is a sensational reconstruction of one of the more extraordinary hidden lives of the twentieth century. An intimate friend of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Thornton Wilder, Steward maintained a secret sex life from childhood on, and documented these experiences in brilliantly vivid (and often very funny) detail.
After leaving the world of academe to become Phil Sparrow, a tattoo artist on Chicago’s notorious South State Street, Steward worked closely with Alfred Kinsey on his landmark sex research. During the early 1960s, Steward changed his name and identity once again, this time to write exceptionally literate, upbeat pro-homosexual pornography under the name of Phil Andros.
Until today he has been known only as Phil Sparrow—but an extraordinary archive of his papers, lost since his death in 1993, has provided Justin Spring with the material for an exceptionally compassionate and brilliantly illuminating life-and-times biography. More than merely the story of one remarkable man, Secret Historian is a moving portrait of homosexual life long before Stonewall and gay liberation.
Autofellatio
James Maker
200 pages • BIGfib Books • September, 2011 • £9.99 [PB]
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We’re reading this at the moment and it laugh-out-loud funny, full of attitude and very sharp!
‘Bloody Brilliant.’ Julie Burchill
‘Glitteringly epigrammatic, it’s a glam-rock Naked Civil Servant in court shoes. But funnier. And tougher.’ Mark Simpson
Autofellatio is the memoir of singer, lyricist, writer and occasional actor James Maker. It begins with his teenage years in punk-era London, moving through the counter-cultural 1980s with an account of the indie group Raymonde and his association with pop artist, Morrissey. Visiting the adventures of rock group RPLA, the filming of “Middleton’s Changeling”, and the party years of the 1990s, it closes with his relocation to, and observations on, life in Spain.
E.M. Forster: A New Life
Wendy Moffat
416 pages • Bloomsbury Publishing • April, 2011 • £10.99 [PB]
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Winner of the Biographers’ Club Best First Biography Prize 2010 and highly recommended.
‘Wendy Moffat’s re-examination of E. M. Forster identifies his homosexuality as being the essence of his creative life. Using unpublished writings, she charts his gradual awakening to the moral, intellectual and emotional significance of his homo-erotic imagination. Her book is an astute and original new portrait of this major novelist.’ Michael Holroyd
‘A bold new re-imagining of Forster’s long career, which makes some striking connections between his life and work.’ D. J. Taylor
By Nightfall
Michael Cunningham
256 pages • Fourth Estate • August, 2011 • £10.99 [PB]
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A New York Times Bestseller from the author of A Home at the End of the World.
‘Cunningham encourages his reader to wrestle with things that interest him by sketching his plots delicately over classic lines. In this case, the arrival of the guest who will change everything is reworked into a discussion about art and decay by a writer who can write a page-turning novel that lingers eloquently in the mind’ The Times
The whole course of one’s life really can change in an instant.
Peter is forty-four, prosperous, childless, the owner of a big New York apartment, a player in the NY contemporary art dealing scene. He has been married to Rebecca for close on twenty years. Their marriage is sound, in the way marriages are. Peter might even describe himself to be happy.
But when Mizzy, Rebecca’s much younger brother, comes to stay, his world is turned upside down. Returning to their New York flat after work one day, Peter sees the outline of Rebecca in the shower. But when he opens the shower door, it is Mizzy he comes face to face with. From that moment on, Mizzy occupies all of Peter’s thoughts. His fascination with him is erotic but not exactly sexual. Without ever really falling out of love with his wife, he tumbles into love with her brother, and is encouraged that way by the young man.
With traces of the tensions that ripple through Thomas Mann’s ‘Death in Venice’, this new novel from Michael Cunningham brilliantly examines the quest for unattainable, and temporal, beauty.
In a Strange Room
Damon Galgut
192 pages • Atlantic Books • April, 2011 • £7.99 [PB]
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‘Beautiful. Strikingly conceived and hauntingly written.’ Jan Morris, Guardian
A young man takes three journeys, through Greece, India and Africa. He travels with little purpose, letting the chance encounters of the road dictate his path. But although he knows that he is drifting, he is unable to settle. It is as if, without these encounters, the person he is cannot exist. And yet each journey ends in disaster. A novel of longing and thwarted desire, rage and compassion, In a Strange Room is an extraordinary evocation of one man’s search for love, and a place to call home.
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