what I’ve been reading lately:

(by James Baldwin) In his introduction to this edition, Kevin Young writes about buying a copy of this book “knowing only it was a book of Paris and exile.” That was more or less my starting point, too – knowing this book was a classic of queer lit, set in Paris, with an American expat…

(Read more)

(by Brian Francis) I wish I’d read the original Canadian version of this rather than the Americanized one (I mean, geez, readers in the US are not going to be totally confused by a reference to Tim Hortons), but ah well. (I wonder if this would have been Americanized to the same extent if it…

(Read more)

(by Hannah Levene) This book is butches in suits and ties, butches playing piano in bars, butches in black jeans and white t-shirts and black leather jackets. It isn’t about plot: as the novel puts it at one point: “And up at the counter something else happens and outside on the street something else happens…

(Read more)

(by K-Ming Chang) What if you hadn’t seen your childhood friend/crush/obsession for ten years, since you were fourteen, and then you unexpectedly ran into her at your workplace? What if she was waiting for you at the bus stop the next day? What if you rode next to each other until the last stop? That’s…

(Read more)

(by Halle Butler) Banal Nightmare is a darkly funny novel about midlife millennial midwestern angst, and I simultaneously enjoyed it and found myself having to take breaks from it, because it’s kind of a lot of cynicism and malaise. At the start of the book, one character, Moddie, has recently broken up with her boyfriend…

(Read more)