STEVEN BEATTIE, REVIEW EDITOR
I spend the bulk of the year immersed in Canadian literature, so if I have downtime over the summer months, I like to mix things up a bit by reading some international writers.
I’m currently working through a fascinating book from Belknap/Harvard called How to Be Gay. The author, David M. Halperin, positions his argument in opposition to post-Stonewall attitudes that locate male homosexuality exclusively in the sexual realm. If there is a cultural aspect to gay masculinity, Halperin asks, what does that imply about the way that culture is experienced both inside and outside the gay community?
I’ve just finished reading Kevin Birmingham’s marvellous work of narrative non-fiction, The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (The Penguin Press). That volume made me hanker to return to Joyce’s masterpiece, which Birmingham argues was not only responsible for a loosening of U.S. obscenity laws, but was also the text that really vaulted the modernist movement into the public consciousness.
Along similar lines, a reading of Lydia Davis’s new collection, Can’t and Won’t (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which features a suite of linked stories told in the voice of Gustave Flaubert, made me want to go back to Madame Bovary and A Sentimental Education.
I adored the New York Review Books translation of French noir writer Jean-Patrick Manchette’s Fatale, so I’m excited to see that NYRB has a new Manchette translation on tap for July: The Mad and the Bad, a book Sarah Weinman calls “wonderfully unhinged.”
One other thriller I’m looking forward to reading this summer is Elizabeth Hand’s Available Dark (Minotaur/ Thomas Dunne Books), about the murder of a fashion photographer with ties to the world of Nordic death metal.