RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksFrankel shies away from none of these behind-the-scenes tensions, allowing the overarching theme of great art requiring hard work and hard feelings to flourish across the many tales told ... By illustrating the city’s homophobic bent in the years leading up to and following Midnight Cowboy’s release, the author also depicts why the most enduring queer marriage will always be between our nelly art and the underground ... Unlike such exceptional biographers as Joan Schenkar or Jenn Shapland, Frankel doesn’t rely on imagination to guide the story he tells with a mastered, Pulitzer-earning succinctness. The enviably straightforward writing style he puts to such great use in Shooting Midnight Cowboy makes sense when one considers his roots: like Rizzo, he’s a Bronx boy, born into a working-class family in the wake of World War II. While Frankel fared better than his fictional shoe-shining film sibling, graduating from Columbia University in 1971, both still boast the same learned understanding and appreciation for New York City’s rogue economies and their geographies...As a result, Frankel makes for the most trustworthy of narrators. Even if it seldom shows in his research-rich chapters, one gets the sense that his interest in this unlikely blockbuster came with, at minimum, a hearty dose of homegrown empathy and curiosity — a dying breed of a combination.
Imani Perry
RaveLambda LiteraryPerry’s title Looking for Lorraine references Isaac Julien’s New Queer Cinema film Looking For Langston, and the book’s eleven chapters mimic the film in execution, in the sense that they do more than merely offer a linear grasp ... While structured around examinations of Hansberry’s journals, manuscripts, and the early radical newspapers for which she worked—and her own invaluable lit scholar soundbites on those—Perry is as committed to the unknown as she is to dutiful research, and she tastefully intertwines her own biography ... At 200 pages, Looking for Lorraine is the lengthiest Hansberry biography available today. It does more to evoke Hansberry personally than the other scholarship on her work ... Perry is unwavering in her choice to convey the whole of Hansberry’s life ... It is a relief that it is Perry who is the first to access the Hansberry papers in their fullest form to date.
Ana Simo
RaveLambda LiteraryCategorized as 'literary dystopia' and 'lesbian pulp noir' by Restless Books, Heartland exists in a liberating matrix of its own creation: one where a book can be politically gifted without having to save the world, and Machiavellian without having to apologize for it ... With political tension always visible in the rear-view mirror, our tough-as-nails narrator steers us into the Great Hunger’s aftermath, gradually catching up to her past with minimal sentimentality ... Heartland is an ideal indulgence for the thick-skinned reader who has reached their fill of Rita Mae Brown’s reliable mystery formula or Thomas Harris’ cannibal page-turners. With petite, intense chapters that know when the reader needs to take a break, this is a book for those who desire a protagonist who will rough them up a bit.
