Queer Recommendations from the New Millenium

I'm really at a lost when it comes to recent gay fiction.
Any recommendations for gay men's fiction written in the past 8 years? I tend toward serious works, but my catty nearest and dearest .... well you can imagine what they say.

Hey there, Willie64. I have a tendency to avoid books that focus on gay "issues." I prefer novels that have gay protagonists but aren't strictly about the gay experience or merely "being gay," if you know what I mean.

If you enjoy serious works, you might want to try The First Verse by Barry McCrea, Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman, Lust, or No Harm Done by Geoff Ryman, Dream Boy by Jim Grimsley, As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann, From Blue to Black by Joel Lane, Troll by Johanna Sinisalo or The Dark Paintings by Hugh Fleetwood. These are just a small handful that I can think of off the top of my head.

If you enjoy dark science fiction/fantasy - you might want to check out Minions of the Moon by Richard Bowes or (and this is a personal favourite) - Wicked Gentlemen by Ginn Hale. These two fall might not be considered "serious" fiction as they fall more into the genre category, but they're both strong, well-written works.

Hi Willie64,

I second Call me by your name -- by no means action packed, but finely observed and splendidly written. As meat loves salt is also worth the read, but a warning: it's pretty harrowing. Sarah Waters' The night watch, set during the Blitz, is worth a go.

Last year I enjoyed Andrew O'Hagan's Be near me and Colm Toibin's Mothers and sons.

In non-fiction, I strongly recommend Sherrill Tippins' February house and you should absolutely get hold of Alison Bechdel's Fun home.

Hi Willie64,
I just joined the group looking through the log I thought I would make a recommendation. You might enjoy Letters to Montgomery Clift by Noel Alumit

I just finished reading Selfish and Perverse by Bob Smith. It is laugh out loud funny. I read it while on vacation and people kept asking me what I was reading. I also agree with librorumamans about Fun Home. It's non-fiction written in graphic novel style but it's one of the best books in any genre of the past 2 or 3 years.

Peter Cameron's newish novel Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is sweet and sad and laugh-out loud funny. I never laugh when reading a book but this one really got me going. The book is billed as
a young adult novel but I read like an adult book to me. The gay aspects of the book are quiet and subtle and the whole thing is tremendously moving and beautifully written. Well worth checking out for something new in gay fiction.

Haven't read any good gay lit in a while; what's happening to the genre? The only one I've read recently is Dale Peck's book What We Lost, which is incredible.

Check out my review of Family Outing by Troy Johnson. It's well worth the read.

The Lambda Book Awards for 2008 were given out last thursday night in LA. It's a huge list of nominees and winners, lots of great new titles. I especially looking forward to reading A Push and A Shove, which won for best first gay novel.

Hi, just joined the group and I thought I could recomend David Leavitt's The Indian Clerk, one of the best 'gay' books I read last year.

A Push and A Shove is completely excellent. I finished it just two weeks ago - right around the time it won the Lambda award and deservedly so.

If you're not interested in a morally ambiguous (and, at times, downright reprehensible) protagonist or if you need a hearts-and-flowers happy ending, then steer clear. Personally, I enjoy the complexity and nuance that this one delivered in spades.

If I might be allowed a little shameless self-promotion, I have two books out (heh) from Kensington, both very positive in their approach. Both are marketed to the adult gay market, though they’re both told from the POV of a gay teen. The first one, A SECRET EDGE, was a finalist for a Lambda award this year. It’s a coming out story (I know, there are a lot of them, but this one’s different; honest!) about a 16-yr-old runner who falls in love with a high jumper from India. He learns, among other things, what the secret edge is that gay men have over hetero men.

The second book, THINKING STRAIGHT, was released April 29, and it has a very topical subject. The protagonist, a Christian boy, is put into an “ex-gay” camp by his parents. He has to learn how to remain true to himself without losing anything of himself in the process. And he does it.

You can read excerpts and reviews on my Web site: www.robinreardon.com.

Like the post above, I really liked CALL ME BY YOUR NAME. Also just finished reading MISSISSIPPI SISSY, by Kevin Sessums, which is a memoir of growing up gay in the south. Very, very well done. Reads like a novel.

Thanks for the information Robin, I will check out both of your books. I think I've already heard about A Secret Edge, both books sound interesting.

Hi Willie, I looked at the nine titles we have in common, almost all of them classics. So, the serious stuff, well, maybe you would enjoy Grief by Andrew Holleran, The line of beauty by Alan Hollinghurst or War against the animals by Paul Russell.

I second the recommendation for Alison Bechdel's Fun Home. It's a graphic novel, which makes it a quick read, but it has the substance of a well-written novel.

I'll chime in with a second on The First Verse, which has Mr. Man and me enthralled as we read it to each other.
edited/fumblefingers

"The Charioteer" by Mary Renault is a splendid novel about a young man's coming to terms with his homosexuality in post-war England, when gays and lesbians had little visibility, sense of community, or even a common language for their shared identities and experience. Written, I believe, in the 1960s, it has held up markedly well.

I second the recommendations of "Line of Beauty." I'd also suggest "The Swimming Pool Library" by Alan Hollinghurst, the same author.

A classic coming-of-age tale is Edmund White's marvelous "A Boy's Own Story," which is the first in a trilogy.

Before he became the renowned author of "The Hours," Michael Cunningham moved me with "A Home at the End of the World."

Although the original question was about fiction, if nonfiction interests people, two of my favorites are White's recent autobiography, "My Lives," "Virtually Normal" by Andrew Sullivan, and Bruce Bawer's "A Place at the Table."

Ok, the original question of this topic, posed nearly a year ago, was to ask for recent gay literature within the past 8 years. Some of the titles discussed are much older than that, including the classic, "A Boy's Own Story," which was written in 1982.

So for recent titles, some that I have read are:

Rainbow Boys, Rainbow High and Rainbow Road, the trilogy of three high schoolers over the course of a year, by Alex Sanchez.

Thinking Straight, by Robin Reardon. Read her post earlier in this thread.

A Density of Souls, The Snow Garden and Light of Day, by Christopher Rice, son of Anne Rice. These three books have gay protagonists, but aren't about being gay, or about gay life. Not directly anyway.

I hope these help the original poster, if he is still around, along with anyone else looking for good reads.

The list of potential nominees for this year's Lambda Book Awards have been posted this past week. This is a huge selection of GLBT books in all categories including memoir,mystery,theatre,first novel,youth.
I always consult the list for the latest titles of interest.
In a few months from this list a smaller list of nominees will be culled, and then the winners will be announced in the spring. It's an exhaustive and wonderful list of new queer literature, and worth checking out at their website.

Hi alans...so what is the website?

The main site is:
http://www.lambdaliterary.org/

The current nominees can be found at:
http://www.lambdaliterary.org/awards/current_nominees.html

Thanks, Phoenix, helpful as always! How's life in Y-town?

Pretty good, pretty good. Especially now that it's warmed up a bit. Who would've thought that 19 degrees could feel so balmy? :-)

LOL

I know! It's 31 here today and I felt like wearing a short-sleeved shirt!

The Stonewall Book Awards were announced at ALA in Denver last Sunday. Light Fell by Evan Fallenberg won the fiction award and Dishonorable Passions: Sodomy Laws in America 1861–2003 by William N. Eskridge, Jr. won for non-fiction. Check out all the Stonewall winners at
http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/rts/glbtrt/stonewall/stonewallbook.cfm#2009 Dan

Many thanks for the link, Dan, there were several really good honors books on the site as well as the winners.

Of the Lambda Literary Awards: has anyone who's been there noticed how many self-published entries there are in this competition? Publishers like CreateSpace and Publish America seem very well-represented. And they're just PoD houses. Hmmm.

On a brighter note, I saw Mike Kaspar's Before I Lose My Style in the debut fiction category! Go Mike! A good book, I'd recommend it to anyone who likes solid storytelling. I got the book in the Early Reviewers program and reviewed it here (it's the eighth review, scroll down!).

I just finished Before I Lose My Style over the weekend and just posted my review. I agree with what you say about the Lamda nominee list. Just about anyone can throw their book over that transom and get on the list. But that will be narrowed down and the best books will emerge. I'm putting my money on Light Fell, Before I Lose My Style and Band Fags. Has anyone read Band Fags yet? Dan

On a slightly different note. I just joined the "Buy a Book a Month Club" (as if limiting myself to that would be possible) group on FaceBook. The premise is obviously to buy at least one book per month but you're supposed to buy it from an independent book seller. Those are few and far between here in Pittsburgh so even when I order online I go to an independent site. If you are on FaceBook check out the group.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=47444299261

To find an independent bookstore in your area go to IndieBound at

http://www.bookweb.org/indiebound/customers

Dan

Great stuff, Dan, and good for the economy. I am old enough to remember the days of indie bookstores not needing a name, it was just the way it was. Department stores sold most books, not Buns and Nubile or Bordures. My older sister and her first husband had a bookstore, and I got to buy the sci-fi and YA stuff they stocked for their ladies-who-lunch customers to give to sons and grandsons.

I grew up in Austin, Texas, which resembles W's Texas very little; we even had a gay and lesbian bookstore stocked to the gills with major publishers' panderings to the newly visible gay readership. Outside of New York City, are there gay and lesbian specialist bookstores still surviving? Some feminist establishments (Bookwoman in Austin, eg) sell lesbian stuff, of course, but a general-interest GLBTQ store...? Educate me, anyone who can, and give me a sense of hope that the queer culture (how we would have railed at that term then!) I joined so happily won't simply fade into irrelevance as we mainstream.

Hey Richard,

There are still a few GLBTQ bookstores around. Giovanni's Room in Philadelphia, Lamda Rising with stores in DC, Rehobeth Beach, and Norfolk (I think) as well as A Different Light in San Francisco and LA and Unabridged in Chicago. They all have web sites and you can order directly from them. I always try to visit these stores when I'm in these cities. So there are a few survivors but they won't last forever if we don't buy from them. I used to shop a lot at Unabridged when I lived in Chicago. Pittsburgh had a predominately GLBTQ bookstore when I moved here, but it's long gone. Very sad. Pittsburgh will have another one when I win the lottery. Dan

Regarding Messages 29 and 30:
While independent bookstores are struggling, there are still plenty of them for us to support. Gay-owned stores with websites you can order on, in addition to the stores in the earlier messages, include: Oscar Wilde in New York City, Calamus in Boston, and Outwrite in Atlanta. There are also gay-owned stores that do not have websites that you should visit when in town, such as Obelisk in San Diego and Lambda Passages in Miami. The Lambda Rising in Norfolk has closed. If you collect gay books of historical value, Bolerium based in San Francisco has a great website. Also, there are independant stores that while not gay owned have large gay/lesbian sections such as Powells in Portland and Tattered Cover in Denver. They deserve to be supported too. The gay writers/readers group on Yahoo has over 250 indepedent bookstores that are gay owned or gay friendly in a data base, so there are plenty of options to avoid the big box stores. We lost our gay-owned store in Dallas last year - it was a sad day.
Dennis

So, a Lotto zillionaire in the making! Can I be the buyer for your GLBTQ store when you're rich? Pretty please with Splenda on top? (I'm watching my avoirdupois.) And I need an excuse to visit Pittsburgh during baseball season...Pirates home games...yum!

ETA Dennis, I had no idea there was such a Yahoo group. Any notions on how I can access this database?

Message 32:
Richardderus: go to www.groups.yahoo.com. Search the name of the group: gaywritersreaders. It is a good group. Most of the conversation is by writers. I enjoy reading about their writing and publishing process. A good way to keep up on new books.

I was in the Tattered Cover last weekend and I was very underwhelmed at their GLBT selections. Couldn't have been more 10 or 12 feet of shelf space and they were very sparsely stocked. Maybe it was just bad timing. It's usually pretty good. I was in the LoDo store not Cherry Creek.

If I win you can be the buyer. I have heard though that you have to buy these ticket things first in order to win. I promise to stop the lottery thread right now, unless I win.

>33 gaymystery: gaymystery, thanks! I will go and search ASAP.

>35 e-zReader: Dan, those pesky details like ticket-buying. Such a pain.

I'm not sure if the site (below) will help identify gay-oriented independent bookstores, Richardderus, but you might explore the resource. Someone in San Francisco recommended it to me, yesterday, as a means of finding area bookstores, but I haven't yet taken the time to delve deeply into its potential. At a first, cursory glance it appears to be a nation-wide listing.

http://www.indiebound.org/indie-store-finder

>37 Rood: thanks Rood! I seem to find a general listing of indies, but I don't think that's a bad thing at all. I love me some Amazon, but in this day and time, I have to think twice about taking trade away from small business owners. Particularly ones that are gay friendly in a climate where Prop 8 can make it past the voters with such a margin.

One recommendation I now make is: Visit Iceland! They have a new Prime Minister, an open lesbian! Spending our tourist dollars in a fascinating place that cares more about ability than identity sounds like a plan to me. There is an article on the subject over here for anyone interested.