Your summer book list just got a whole lot gayer
By Gregg Shapiro
Whether you read at the beach, at the pool, in the backyard, in bed or in the bathtub, gay books and titles of LGBT interest, books will definitely enhance your summer reading experience.
NOVEL IDEAS
The second installment in magazine editor and cultural writer Georgette Gouveia’s The Games Men Play series, The Penalty For Holding (Less Than Three Press, 2017) tells the story of backup quarterback Quinn Novak whose triumph on the playing field gets him noticed by Mal and Tam, players on opposing teams, leading to a different kind of scoring.
Queer Canadian visual artist and writer Shani Mootoo’s latest novel Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab (Akashic, 2014, 2017) follows the journey of writer Jonathan as he searches for the mother who left when his parents divorced.
The tumultuous, creative and ultimately tragic life of Isadora Duncan, the bisexual mother of modern dance, is given the novel treatment in Isadora (FSG, 2017) by Amelia Gray.
A fertile “crop” of writers, including Keith Glaeske, James Penha and Evey Brett, contributed to the “men and vegetation” anthology His Seed: An Arboretum of Erotica (Unzipped, 2017), edited by Steve Berman.
NON-FICTION NOW
The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life (FSG, 2017) by Karin Roffman is described as “the first comprehensive biography of the early life” of gay poet John Ashbery, who turns 90 this summer. The author of 20 volumes of poetry, Ashbery received the Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.
The Dog’s Last Walk (and Other Pieces) (Bloomsbury, 2017) by Howard Jacobson, author of the 2010 Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Finkler Question, is the second collection of the writer’s weekly columns for The Independent, which he wrote for the paper until it ceased publication in 2016.
POETIC STYLE
Jackknife: New and Selected Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017) by Jan Beatty opens with 22 new poems (such as “The World Between Jim Morrison’s Legs”) and features poems from her four prior books Mad River, Boneshaker, Red Sugar and the acclaimed The Switching/Yard (including “Dear American Poetry.”)
With the “fully annotated and comprehensive” New Collected Poems (FSG, 2017), edited by Heather Cass White, Marianne Moore, one of the pioneers of poetic modernism, finally gets the thorough compendium that she has long deserved.
MORE WORDS & PICTURES
Fans of Garbage (the band, of course) are going to be happy – not only when it rains, as the song says – with the coffee-table book This Is the Noise That Keeps Me Awake (Akashic, 2017) written by Garbage (Shirley Manson, Butch Vig, Duke Erikson and Steve Marker) with Jason Cohen, and crammed full of color and black & white photos, band interviews and much more.
Endorsement blurbs from Alison Bechdel and Roz Chast adorn the back cover of Everything Is Flammable (Uncivilized Books, 2017), the full-length graphic memoir debut by Gabrielle Bell, about the New York-based alternative cartoonist’s attempts at improving her mother’s life following a fire that destroyed her home.