MixedThe BafflerIn Room on the Sea, Aciman indulges in his vision of benevolent Italian service laborers with even greater gusto ... Coasting on the success of Call Me by Your Name, Aciman seems content to loaf inside picturesque reveries of this sort. In the hands of a more interesting prose stylist, the meandering could work, but the sentences are as pancake-flat as the plots ... Sifting through Aciman’s enervating procession of gorgeous, sun-dappled days in Italy, I was reminded of the dull feeling one gets toward the end of a holiday, the antsy determination to get back into the action of the everyday. The quotidian friction might seem worse, but it has much to teach us. To stay on vacation forever is to live in heaven, which is not to live at all.
Torrey Peters
RaveThe New Yorker... dishy, engrossing ... the story moves seamlessly from present to past ... prickly, funny Reese is the star of the show. Her casually devastating assessments of other characters and her sardonic narration lend the novel its insider chattiness. It’s full of the kind of talk that trans people would normally reserve for one another ... Peters’s invocation of detransition, a relatively rare phenomenon commonly cited to claim that trans people are delusional, has an air of menace to those invested in shifting transphobic attitudes. But, in refusing to avoid the sore spots of trans life, Peters offers a lucidity that would be impossible if her only goal were to inspire sympathy. She is refreshingly uninterested in persuading the public of the bravery and nobility of trans people, and lets them be as dysfunctional as anyone else.
Lou Sullivan, Ed. by Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma
RaveSlate... ripe with mirth, confusion, lust, despair, hope, and charm ... Before I read the diaries, when I only knew about the major bullet points of [Lou\'s] life, I was astonished by the idea that anyone could parse his own mysterious needs so clearly with no template. I thought of him as heroic, almost inhuman. But We Both Laughed in Pleasure is better than the sterile document I had imagined: It gave me the rare, uncanny experience of reliving my youth through his, of cataloging his moments of idiocy and bliss as though they were my own, with a specificity I didn’t know was possible. After Sullivan speaks for the first time, by phone, with another trans man, he writes, \'I felt very masculine talking with him, and very relaxed, like for the 1st time I was talking with someone who understood what I meant.\' I couldn’t help but feel the same way.
