RaveThe NationGhaziani renders a complex picture of how going out as a queer person is changing; his approach to the topic, at once intimate and meticulous, ultimately enables his own perspective to shine through. Refreshingly, Long Live Queer Nightlife refuses anguish.
Robert Gluck
RaveThe New YorkerThe book’s subject is not only Ed but also his generation of gay men, many of whom lost their lives to aids. In Glück’s hands, memorializing becomes a defiant celebration of sex. Few writers have approached this task with his shameless feeling—Glück is one of the best around at portraying the mysteries of the flesh, and in About Ed, as in his previous novels, his amatory writing is magnificently precise ... The New Narrative encourages active self-questioning on the page, and Glück operates beautifully in this tradition, reconsidering and amending his recollections from the vantage of age. About Ed revisits the past through moments that he can neither forget nor firmly grasp ... A successful memorial in part because it is a promiscuous one.
Gary Indiana
RaveFriezeIndiana inhabits his role with fangs on. His famously antagonistic addresses to the reader...are as calculated as a Rainer Werner Fassbinder film: nothing is truly raw, disdain for bourgeois values is inbuilt and every depiction feels art-directed with decadent grime in mind ... This self-consciousness protects Indiana from feeling wooed by his own persona, as do the stresses of writing seriously in an economically precarious time ... Fire Season highlights his dogged reportage and erudite analysis far more than his shock value ... This latest release is less a surprise than a rich record of overlapping eras of history – ones coloured both by Indiana’s prophetic mind and the dread we bring to historical events in retrospect ... Fire Season is nothing if not high-minded ... As much a moralist as a bad boy, Indiana understands that the two positions enable each other, that they provide balance and nuance to what might be mutually thin shticks. This is, and has always been, his subtext: he raves like a wigged-out drunk so he can impart a message of compassion and progressivism, and the need for this acrobatic balance is an indictment of society at large.
Alejandro Zambra, tr. Megan McDowell
PanVillage VoiceAlejandro Zambra is a star in the constellation of poesy-interested prose writers ... Chilean Poet focuses on multiple generations of bards ... At its best, the book is self-aware, smattered with metafictional intrusions whose playfulness is sadly passé in today’s literature ... At its worst—well, Zambra writes about Brooklyn ... Thankfully, such hackneyed depictions of poor-by-choice bohemia don’t take up much real estate, and one of the novel’s most successful sections finds Pru visiting Chilean poets both fictional and real ... There’s believable lesbian romance in Chilean Poet, yet gay men cruise along the narrative’s borders like stereotypes of desperate queens, sinking Chilean Poet from being uncharacteristically uneven to becoming dastardly ... It’s a shame, since Zambra’s self-awareness redeems sections that would drown capital-R realist prose ... Vicente’s interiority...injects the book with rejuvenating insights, clueing us in to the possibility that Gonzalo’s boring narration was a deliberate reflection of his lackluster verse ... One passage of Chilean Poet shines particularly bright with this profound core, sparkling unlike the myriad moments when Zambra’s sensibility fails his characters ... I am not a Chilean critic, but I am a gay critic, and we write criticism about homophobic novels like Chilean Poet while keeping them at arm’s length, especially when, as is the case with clever, capable Zambra, the author should know better.
Claire-Louise Bennett
RaveThe Village Voice... masterful ... a working-class novel with an English setting and a sweep of sensibility and prose inspired by a larger swatch of the so-called British Isles. Like one giant, illuminating digression, Checkout 19 pretends to contemplate novels and writing but actually teaches us about people ... Bennett demonstrates how literature provides many kinds of mobility. It leads the narrator out of a class-bound childhood in which the \'future was mapped out … on the smallest scrap of paper.\' Simultaneously, by casting images like gemstones in streams of prose, Bennett shows how books are portals through which Very Serious Adults inhabit their lust, gender, atavism, silliness, humor, and yearning for freedom ... This great work draws us out of our solitude and makes us commune with it at the same time.
Douglas Wolk
PositiveThe Village Voice... the book bears the alluring scent of the completionist, someone who reached the end ... Critically, Wolk doesn’t log all 27,000-plus comics that compose the publisher’s lumbering megatext, but cherry-picks a series of through lines he sequences with a conversational, entertaining voice and casually whip-smart analysis ... Wolk knows which comics have touched on his own idiosyncrasies—and when Marvel’s mirror version of the world, Earth-616, rotates with surprising relevance around our ailing planet at large. Naturally, his issues are different from mine. I can’t say I care enough about hammer-wielding Thor to enjoy a couple dozen pages and ample footnotes about his exploits, and I wish Wolk had given more space to Daredevil ... We never lose sight of Wolk’s own authorship, one of the reasons he can weave together a series of curated, argumentative plot summaries over almost 400 pages. A writer with less control would put us to sleep ... The book incorporates some exemplary Marvel panels, but these are irritatingly too small to read without a magnifying glass. And Wolk’s sensibility falls short in its examination of Marvel as a business ... Let Wolk’s deserving text be more than free marketing material for a corporation ... Buy it for the critical thinker who uses alternative worlds and fantastical allegories as a lens of analysis, so they can pick apart a failed utopia made in the image of our own.
Joy Williams
RaveThe Village VoiceDoes their newness to life make these characters redeemable? Williams thinks so—the prose evokes the futile cry of those weaned on American privilege then condemned to an adulthood of climate change ... If this sounds bleak—it is!—Williams’s jokes and insights come fast, herding us through a rolling, expansive plot ... The carnivalesque, post-apocalyptic narrative...is a mere occasion for a pruned wilderness of precise, ranging prose ... Worldbuilding comes through dialogue, as breathless recognitions of society’s dystopia. Sentences layer symbolic and actual significance, excruciating sadness and humor ... The novel never feels performative or, God forbid, opportunistic for its grimness—Williams’s humor gives the impression that she internalized this doleful mood long ago. It’s perhaps her most difficult to read: Unfolding in a scant 200 pages, the book contains the comprehensive melancholy of someone in their December years who cares deeply about the living, human and animal alike ... The masterful Harrow provides us with something strange and discomfitingly lifelike: a time-lapse of the elderly fading at their edges, and other doomed characters whose youth, at best, might allow them to run more gracefully out of time.
Ed. by R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell
PanLos Angeles Review of BooksThe kink...is pretty one-note. There’s a lot of BDSM, most of it light ... Unlike so many entries in the history of erotic writing, these tales are hardly ever larger-than-life, never seeming to embody kink from the inside, so much as they depict it from the outside ... Perhaps expectedly, the collection’s charms are entirely bound up in the MFA-vetted, sometimes hugely impressive technical skill of the contributors ... Yet for all of Kink’s compositional thrills, it runs into a stumbling block of realism, and particularly the realist sex scene: language’s inadequacy. Kink brims with characters describing their inability to describe arousal ... Kink refuses to lead its readers into...risky, rewarding, and complicated terrain ... The editors fail to recognize that provocation and intention can coexist in even the most radical work without the latter making its presence known ... Kink isn’t really about playing. It’s about being \'literary,\' a marketing term used by publishers that the book’s editors have conflated with the word \'artistic\' ... What Kink is doing is denouncing \'low-class\' culture ... Kwon and Greenwell are merely acting like redevelopers serving a complicated, corrosive, and familiar system of governance. They do not own erotic art, and if they want to move into its neighborhood, they would do well to act like neighbors, not gentrifiers ... literary fiction is their kink. It’s not ours, not everyone’s.
Jameson Fitzpatrick
PositiveThe BelieverFitzpatrick writes confessional, autobiographical work rooted in identity in part because the mode provides him with an interesting filter for looking at heritage. His poems brim with banal details that he uses to point toward the artificiality of referencing the hardships and culture of our gay forefathers ... For Fitzpatrick, the self is a sieve through which history is strained ... Fitzpatrick’s insights are often true-to-life, and drawn more from personal experience than historical conjecture. Plus, he delivers them in a lucid and honed poetic voice ... His style is colloquial, and precise without ever being precious. In fact, any instance of more formal syntax stands out ... I admire Fitzpatrick for transcending the formal hang-ups of past generations, a burden that other writers spend their careers sorting out. Still, I’m waiting to read what he feels bad about next, and also a more diverse look at what makes him feel good.
Robert Gluck
PositiveThe Baffler...Kempe is Glück’s most beautiful work of fiction. Its reissue includes a dry-as-onionskin introduction by éminence grise Colm Tóibín and an inexplicable cover illustration of a Greek winged angel—all of the superficial signs that the heterosexual fiction establishment has decided to acknowledge a literary fag. The novel is followed by a short essay by Glück ... Packaging a reissue like this may be routine, but still it makes me wonder: Why hang Glück’s fiction between two explanations, rather than let his prose speak for itself, with all of the wildness and ambiguity it expressed in 1994? ... The novel stands alone in Glück’s oeuvre, not for its wildness—his lucid, precise descriptions of sex distinguish each of his four volumes of fiction—but for its ambiguity ... The New Narrative embraced the literature of transgression from its beginning, yet Kempe’s shock value was also a response to the squeamish landscape of the late 1980s and 1990s ... Even the tendency of the New Narrative writers to name-drop, to network within the texts themselves, seems a devastatingly relatable acknowledgement of the draconian forces mounting just outside the walls of their mutually supportive literary community. By the time Margery Kempe came into the world, these forces had converged; like so many gay people who came out just before or during the AIDS crisis, the New Narrative discovered itself simultaneously with its own death. Yet its ideas are mutable, which makes them immortal.
Yukio Mishima, Trans. by Sam Bett
PositiveThe Kenyon Review... locates [Mishima] in a closet full of fire-and-brimstone. In many of his books, he fills this closet with an awareness of his Japanese heritage, but here he fills it with largely surface-level thoughts about his immediate surroundings. The surface, luckily, is a beautiful one ... Mishima melds his own writerly analytical skill with Rikio’s experience, elucidating aspects of the film world one rarely sees in literature ... an efficient, economical book in which ordinary life concerns are muted in favor of fashionable appearances ... The translator, Sam Bett, manages to preserve a difficult balance of precision and lyricism that captures Mishima’s coldly ecstatic voice ... unusually lucid in its encapsulation of the experience of this rarest occupation. We can only hope to be so unlucky.
Maryse Meijer
RaveBOMB Magazine[Meijer\'s] stories are fabular, which imbue readers with the expectation of a moral. But like the work of many moralists before her, Meijer’s is emotionally riveting precisely because no lessons or precepts ever come: she fashions her fiction as a photonegative of the world she believes that people should live in, her neighborhood a grimy suburb of empty streets, violent homes, veiled feelings and unrequited obsessions ... undoubtedly one of Meijer’s greatest assets is her ability to animate the ins and outs of the male psyche ... Rag is more claustrophobic than Meijer’s previous books, by far her most brutal, and also her most sophisticated and technically self-conscious. In multiple stories, Meijer tricks her readers into believing male narrators are females. Admirably, she wields her mastery of conventional craft for repetitive, blunt effect, an approach that intentionally suffocates the reader with horrific reality.
Christine Schutt
Rave3:AM MagazineSchutt’s Los Angeles, replete with inextinguishable fires and gun-wielding children, reflects the content of today’s news stories, yet the prosody of her phrases, the sinuous assonance and the juxtapositions of images, points to her literary roots in twentieth century New York ... The intense focus [Gordon] Lish urged his authors to pay to the sound of their sentences plays out in Schutt’s nimble and voluble prose ... In this book, perhaps the best of her career, she has drawn together her various talents and methodologies into something singular ... Schutt’s flirtation with postmodernism is so moving and effective it may make the reader close Pure Hollywood and look at its sulphur-pink cover ... Whatever their surroundings, the inhabitants of Pure Hollywood are fascinatingly impure and always worth reading about.
