MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewBratton has created a marvelously detailed world of supernumerary aristocrats ... In Hal, Bratton offers a psychologically acute portrait of the kind of trauma-born narcissists who yo-yo between judging everyone else as beneath them and hating themselves for those very judgments. But a portrait is not a novel, which depends as much on plot and action as it does character and world-building. Bratton has accurately drawn a protagonist stuck still by his pain, and the result is a story that for long stretches also feels stuck itself ... By giving Hal a direct and backward-looking explanation for his actions... Henry Henry obviates the delicious questions about his behavior. Sure, Hal’s self-aware about his conduct, but he doesn’t seem to have agency over it, and thus lacks that Shakespearean moral complexity. And without that, Henry Henry feels well written but inert.
Justin Torres
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewTorres’s lyrical new novel, Blackouts, these two forms — erasure poetry and queer history — collide to create one epic conversation between a pivotal 20th-century queer sexology text and two unreliable queer Puerto Rican narrators ... The supreme pleasure of the book is its slow obliteration of any firm idea of reality — a perfect metaphor for the delirious disorientation that comes with learning queer history as an adult ... Torres haunts this book full of ghosts like a ghost himself, and with this novel, he has passed the haunting on, creating the next link in a queer chain from Jan to Juan to nene to you.
Alice Winn
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewWinn’s prose is percussive, driving the story forward with a mix of Edwardian masculine sentimentality and the improbable plotting of a period romance ... The book is cut into the shape of a thousand cliffhangers, and although once or twice it strains credulity, I couldn’t put it down ... Winn’s exquisite pacing lives in her syntax as much as her plot, giving vim and vigor to every line.
Davey Davis
PositiveNew York Times Book ReviewA queer, near-future noir ... Lyrical and nonlinear, with sentences that feel like carved obsidian: dark, sharp and shiny. Here, however, the voice is less poetic and more terse, like the patter of a hard-boiled detective from a classic film. This is a queer noir world, full of inexplicable violence, an encyclopedia’s worth of sexual deviance and a deeply flawed, untrusting and untrustworthy antihero. At times, Davis’s styling goes too far, torquing sentences into awkward shapes...but the overall effect is masterly, a perfect mating of style and subject ... Not all readers will be able to personally identify with the novel’s stories of sexual waterboarding, but many will recognize the experience of devouring, adjudicating and enjoying the worst (and often last) days of someone’s life for entertainment ... Again and again, X shows us how sex and death are entangled for many people, not just BDSM queers from the future ... Indeed, the darkest parts of X are not the scenes of snuff films or future fascism; they are what the novel suggests about our present. We are not reading some far-off or improbable future. At times, the novel feels like a dispatch from next week.
Sarah Schulman
PositiveBoston ReviewLet the Record Show is in part a grand accounting, tallying up what was won, what was lost, and the process through which those battles were fought. Only by this kind of rigorous analysis can the lessons of ACT UP be passed on to current and future activists ... Let the Record Show is a work of considerable formal daring composed almost entirely of quotes taken from those oral histories, woven together with summaries and interstitials that cohere those voices into a narrative ... Schulman doesn’t replace one set of heroes with another; rather, she destroys the idea of singular heroes at all. This is a political choice that creates a more honest representation of ACT UP, and it is a strength of the book—but like all strengths, it contains its own weakness ... It at times can get repetitive ... Let the Record Show is unquestionably the product of Schulman’s unique vision.
Jeremy Atherton Lin
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewJeremy Atherton Lin’s beautiful, lyrical memoir, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, cloaks [...] lived history in [...] learned history, examining an objective subject — gay bars — to create a highly subjective object: a book about his life, flensed down to just the bits that made it past the bouncer ... Gay Bar dances on the edge of that third space between fiction and nonfiction, a space often reserved for poetry ... Atherton Lin himself is rendered only in relation to the bars he walks us through; you’ll find yourself hard-pressed at the end to say where he was born or how many siblings he has (and you won’t care). But Atherton Lin has a five-octave, Mariah Carey-esque range for discussing gay sex ... Gay Bar is well crafted [...] with a strong authorial hand that makes the reader feel carefully shepherded through the text, even as Atherton Lin jumps decades and continents. The nonlinear chronology allows him to start in the present moment, cluing us in to a central truth of the book: We are always in the present ... Atherton Lin’s final realization is that it may not matter why he went out (that question may not even be answerable) but the act of going out, of being in that particular \'we\' in those particular bars, has made him — gloriously, irreparably — who he is.
Michelle Tea
PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of Books...delightful on both a narrative and a metatextual level ... its lyrical yet lucid prose is both beautiful and easily digestible ... Tea evocatively captures the malaise of her particular 1990s queer subculture. Indeed, for those who lived through that period, Black Wave is laced with tiny, perfect details ... By writing in third person, she primes her audience to understand from the very beginning that her narrator is both she and not she. Throughout the book, she calls out her own inherent biases and flaws of perception.
Sarah Schulman
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksOver the course of the novel, Bette proves to be an insightful and surprising narrator, but there is perhaps no more enduring character in all of Schulman’s writing than New York City: it is her muse, her moral compass, and her love interest, much as it is for Bette ... The novel is a paean to their neighborly love, which stretches across hallways and demographic distances, and which is earned, as opposed to obligated, the way familial love is ... It would be easy to enjoy The Cosmopolitans even if you had never heard the name Sarah Schulman before. But the book rests upon a powerful foundation.
