House Arrest: Pandemic Diaries, Alan Bennett (Faber & Faber, July) The prolific English author and actor is old enough that, when the pandemic hit at the beginning of this slim diary, the only “medical scourge” he could think to compare it to was the tuberculosis that afflicted his Leeds neighbourhood in the 1940s.
What was important to the author was something other than accuracy, some essence he thought he glimpsed when he encountered the protagonist of this story.”Īlso a Poet: Frank O’Hara My Father and Me, Ada Calhoun (Grove, June) When Calhoun stumbled upon a box of musty cassettes containing interviews her father, New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, had conducted with the late American poet Frank O’Hara, she sensed a dual opportunity: an O’Hara fan herself, could she complete her father’s aborted biography and, in so doing, bring them closer together? But the O’Hara book soon turns MacGuffin, Calhoun having produced, instead, this sly, eminently readable account of a complex filial relationship. The Twilight World, Werner Herzog (Penguin Press, June) Though plugged as his first novel, the caveat that precedes the Fitzcarraldo director’s book about his 1977 meeting with Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who continued fighting for his country in the Philippines three decades after the Second World War ended, is characteristically indeterminate: “Most details are factually correct some are not. This latest, tempered with dark humour, is about a man who moved to Florida to look after his parents during the AIDS crisis and must now confront his own mortality and solitude, as the death of his only friend looms. The Kingdom of Sand, Andrew Holleran (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June) Dancer from the Dance, Holleran’s 1978 debut, is considered a classic of gay literature. Voice together with wonderfully unexpected, laugh-cry results. The mother of 13-year-old Tanya marries a locally famous radio announcer (who, also chatty in the bedroom, narrates “their sex life the way he did the weekend stock-car races”) then takes off with another man, leaving Tanya and Mr. The Angel of Rome: And Other Stories, Jess Walter (Harper, June) The first story in the Beautiful Ruins author’s latest collection, Mr. Remnants, Céline Huyghebaert (Book*hug, June) In her first novel (originally titled Le drap blanc), which won the 2019 Governor-General’s Award for French-language Fiction, the France-born artist alternates between diaristic and journalistic approaches, incorporating collage, interviews, transcripts, photographs to build a picture of her difficult and largely absent late father. Miro” being the pseudonym of a writer who “lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest.” Think Umbrella Academy meets Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.
Miro (McClelland & Stewart, June) The author of this 1800s-set steampunk fantasy with a cast of characters big enough to pack a Victorian orphanage is Canadian on faith: “J. In the City of Pigs, André Forget (Rare Machines, June) Forget’s absurdist, music-infused debut concerns a classical pianist who leaves Montreal, site of his artistic failures, for a shiny new life in condo-strewn Toronto, where he gets drawn into a murky world where capitalism and the avant-garde underground intertwine in uncomfortable ways. A strong cover plug by Hilary Mantel, who knows a thing or two about breathing life into historical figures, makes this one of the season’s best bets. Gay Sex gayfuck.xxx Gay Clips GaySex Gay XXX gayxxx.xxx porngay.xxx XXX XXX PICS NSFW SEX GAY XXX GaySex gayxxx.porn gaymen.xxx Gay XXX Spank Wire.Joan: A Novel of Joan of Arc, Katherine J Chen (Random House, July) If you like your summer reading ancient, violent, historic and French – and who doesn’t? – then this imagining of the life of a young Joan of Arc may well hit the spot.