Creative concepts Previously published by Rescue Press, the newly reissued Paul Takes The Form of a Mortal Girl (Vintage, 2017/2019), the debut novel by educator and editor Andrea Lawlor, is about “shapeshifter” Paul, who wildly oscillates from “Riot Grrrl to leather cub” and from “Women’s Studies major to trade” while traversing Iowa City, Boystown, Provincetown and San Francisco. Inspired by the last 50 years of the devastation done to the Amazon, Indian communities and homesteaders by drug cartels, insurgent groups and the Colombian government, Like This Afternoon Forever (Kaylie Jones Books/Akashic) by Colombian-born gay writer Jaime Manrique, centers on the “visceral love story” of Lucas and Ignacio. Mostly Dead Things (Tin House Books, 2019), the debut novel by queer writer Kristen Arnett, introduces us to Jessa, forced to take over her family’s dying taxidermy business following her father’s suicide, as her other family members barely hold it together as their lives unravel. For her second historical novel, The Flight Portfolio (Knopf, 2019), Julie Orringer gives readers a meticulously researched fiction portrait of Varian Fry, an American gay man credited with saving the lives (and works) of creative geniuses condemned by the Nazis, including Marc Chagall, Hannah Arendt, Marcel Duchamp and André Breton. Prolific gay poet/writer/editor/publisher Raymond Luczak pays tribute to Djuna Barnes’ 1936 book Nightwood with his new novel Flannelwood (Red Hen Press, 2019), in which barista and failed poet Bill meets and spends a passion-filled winter with disabled factory employee James only to have the relationship end abruptly in the spring, leading Bill on a quest for answers. Pan’s Ex: Queer Sex Poetry (Qommunicate Publishing, 2019), edited by Sage Kalmus, is a slim, pocket-sized erotic poetry anthology featuring the work of Kenneth Pobo, Sean Patrick Mulroy, Marie Hartung, David Meischen, Anthony DiPietro and Raven Sky, among others.
Showbiz You didn’t know it, but Drag: Combing Through the Big Wigs of Show Business (Rizzoli, 2019) by Frank DeCaro, with a foreword by Bruce Vilanch, is the book you’ve been waiting for all your gay life. A coffee table book suitable for more than coffee talk (Mike Meyers as Linda Richman even gets a mention), DeCaro’s thoroughly researched and very colorful tome, illustrates that “drag in show business…goes back a lot further than the first season of Drag Race”, as it takes us from ancient Greece into the 21st century. In their book Riverdish: The Unauthorized Case Files of Riverdale (Dey Street, 2019), Riverdish podcast creators Ryan Bloomquist & Samantha Gold invite you to “hold on to your milkshake” as they reveal how the setting of the popular (and very queer) TV series Riverdale, know as the “town with pep”, became notorious as a “great place to get away with it all”. From obscure sitcoms such as the rightfully short-lived The Ugliest Girl in Town to more popular fare including The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Beverly Hillbillies, Quinlan Miller’s Camp TV: Trans Gender Queer Sitcom History (Duke University Press, 2019) analyzes “queer representation and gender nonconformity” on television during the 1950s and 1960s. Boasting an assortment of LGBTQ characters, including Stewie Griffin, Karen Griffin and Bruce, as well as an array of musical numbers, Seth MacFarlane’s long-running animated series Family Guy is given the coffeetable book treatment with Inside Family Guy: An Illustrated History (Dey Street, 2019) by Frazier Moore, featuring a foreword by MacFarlane.
16 | 05.15.19