Queer

Theodoridou’s recent book is my small press club’s pick for June, and what a strange little book. It is a retelling, kind of, of the Bluebeard story. I think I first encountered the Bluebeard story in Stephen King’s The Shining, but probably before in some form as well. In general, I think the book is quite good. Theodoridou’s framing device for Sour Cherry features an unnamed narrator reciting the events of the tale as though they are a ghost story, presumably to “you” the reader, who also may or may not be a child. ...

I became aware of Guibert via Philippe Besson’s Lie With Me, and so picked up Written in Invisible Ink, a collection of short stories which I had mixed feelings about but generally liked. Crazy for Vincent has been on my saved titles list on ThriftBooks for quite a while and I finally found a copy. It’s a short little diary, told reverse-chronologically, of Hervé’s love for Vincent. It begins in 1989 at the end of November, with Vincent’s death. I often forgot that we are moving back through time, through the period of Hervé’s knowing of and love for (obsession with?) Vincent. In a way it is fitting that we start with Vincent’s death, because we have no sense of the book-Hervé’s continued life afterwards, it is as if he, too, died. ...

Greenwell’s follow up to What Belongs to You feels more distinctly like a collection of short stories. I picked the book off my shelf before heading to work, unwilling to scrape my brain against Dostoevsky on my 50-minute morning metro ride. Small Rain, my first Greenwell and the follow up to this book, knocked me flat on my back, and I enjoyed What Belongs very much. So much that I’ve been saving Cleanness for just an occasion as this, a need for something I knew would capture me. ...

February’s book club pick. I felt excited to vaguely engineer the polls such that we could finally cover a Semiotexte title, not to mention one that I was certain would be weird and gay. The certainty proved well-founded, because I more or less am not sure what happened in the book, but I enjoyed every page, such that some of these very sad paragraphs can be enjoyed. Gary Indiana’s book is at least faintingly autobiographical, though whose to say just how much. Some parts seem so clearly translated from real people that I refuse to believe their synthetics. I did not read the introduction before reading the book so became educated that at least one character seems to be directly inspired by Susan Sontag, which I found just delicious. ...

“Sex was the reply to any question.” There’s a lot of sex in this book, and a lot of it is quite hot to read. But it is not exactly smut. There is something in it of the loss of sense, the obliteration of the person by way of pleasure into nothingness. All that aside, a lot of it is also simply hot to read. I bought this without knowing anything about it in the NYRB sale. I saw the penis-graced cover (in what I will call an art style I do not like, apologies to the artist Louis Fratino), saw that it was apparently pretty gay, and figured why not. The back jacket has a quote from William S. Burroughs: ...

As soon as I finished Small Rain, or at least once I snapped out of the adoring daze in which it left me, I ordered copies of Greenwell’s other books, this along with Cleanness. The three share a loose continuity, with (apparently) the same unnamed narrator. This book following him through a few years spent in Bulgaria, as he entwines with and parts from Mitko. Greenwell’s prose is as lovely here as in Small Rain, and I sometimes re-read sentences just to soak in them. Elements feel so tangible and real that they risk implanting ‘false’ memories, or drawing out those that share kinship in your own life, reflecting and refracting off these written words. Such was the flash to our protagonist’s history with his father on page 72: ...

This review contains a lot of discussion of sex, cruising, and other “NSFW” stuff. I would encourage you to NOT read it if that makes you uncomfortable. I suppose it’s my fault. I picked this book up hoping for something a little closer to smut than the navel-gazing that we so often receive from Betancourt in these pages. If nothing else, it has served as a splendid source for reading recommendations, there are dozens and dozens of references to books, essays, films. Several of the essays are more or less about (or use to great length as framing) films or works of art as a device by which the author can reflect on relationship and sex dynamics. Some are interesting. Some are quite boring and annoying. ...

I’ve been eyeballing Greenwell’s bluecovered Small Rain since the hardback hit my local bookstore’s shelves in 2024. I felt it reaching out for me, I could tell it would be sad and I didn’t know what flavour that sadness would be. I finally bought a copy a few months ago and have let it set on the living room table, to stare at for a few weeks, then I put it on my TBR shelf, away from the other up-next books that usually stack on that table. A few weeks ago I finished a book and without thinking at all I went to the shelf and pulled it down. Something about me knew it was time. Reading the first page, I started to worry—the writing is near-stream-of-consciousness, a style that exhausted me recently reading Mrs. Dalloway. Then, on the last line of the first page, that equally exhausting word: pandemic. ...

I picked this up on-sight, recognizing Besson’s name. I adored “Lie With Me,” I mean I was simply gripped the whole time, could not put it down. That book was translated by Molly Ringwald, of Molly Ringwald fame, and it was her first published translated work. Frank Wynne translated this book, who seems to have translated quite a few works, including (after this, from what I can tell), other works from Besson. ...

I love an eye-catching, one-word title. “Porn” is about as good a one as you could think up, though at times I wondered if “Taboo” might be a more fitting title for Polly Barton’s exploration into the scandalous arts. Through interviews with 19 people, most of whom she already knew, the author reports more about societal expectation and anxiety than the specific “oral history” of the porn industry. What is common, what is kink? What is normal, problematic? At a few points, this question comes up: “Do we fuck this way because of porn, or does porn look like this because it’s how we fuck?” ...