May 21, 2004

Trust Fund Boys

Sometime back I wrote about Rob Byrne?s The Night We Met. His response to my comments was very kind so &

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April 26, 2004

Free gay short fiction

I get lots of requests to post links, mostly automated spam requests from bottom-tier ecommerce sites that scan domain registration &

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January 12, 2004

The kindness of gay strangers

I mentioned a fellow bringing in a bunch of gay fiction to my shop. I?d asked him if he could &

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November 10, 2003

Heinlein vs. Taken

Hasty, unedited rant. When I was a kid growing up I read lots and lots of science fiction. The old &

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October 27, 2003

Depressing gay fiction

Do you remember when gay fiction was depressing? Huh -- would be a fair reaction. In the days &

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September 17, 2003

Witty, literate gay novelists?

Farce and social comedy are my biases in fiction: P.G. Wodehouse, Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh, Tom Sharpe, Kingsley Amis. Working &

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August 16, 2003

A couple of books on the English Reformation

Once upon a time Europeans were all Roman Catholic. OK, that ignores the Orthodox churches. Western Europeans all acknowledged the &

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Mediocre book on Elizabeth I

Wallace McCaffrey's Elizabeth I isn't bad enough to bitch about. I don't even have much to say about it. I &

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The Invention of Ancient Israel

As a teen I was born again as the fundamentalists like to call it (vide I get saved). Luckily I &

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Shakespeare: scholars & crackpots

Samuel Schoenbaum's Shakespeare's Lives is a history of Shakespeare scholarship and folklore, not that the distinction is always a sure &

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July 17, 2003

Pomo-babble

To commit a sentence like that is to subtract from the sum of human knowledge. Writes Robert Fulford in the &

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May 28, 2003

Green carnation a secret queer symbol?

By Merlin Holland, Oscar Wilde's grandson: The 10 most popular misconceptions about Oscar Wilde &

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May 11, 2003

Pictures from an Institution

they longed for men to be discovered on the moon so they could show that they weren't prejudiced toward moon &

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May 03, 2003

Michael Frayn is incentive?

Trying to remember something about Michael Frayn I was looking at a comment on one of his books. When the &

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April 19, 2003

Christopher Hitchens on Evelyn Waugh

Waugh's mastery is most often shown by the light flick with which he could switch between the funny and the &

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April 14, 2003

Nietzsche: from Nazi to postmodern hero

Archiving yet another reply to a comment on my Live Journal. Nietzsche wasn't really given to system building. In his &

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April 11, 2003

Kingsley Amis: The King's English

I read my first Kingsley Amis novel a few years back. Can?’t remember the title. I?’m terrible about things like &

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April 06, 2003

God's Funeral

I?’ve always tended to give the 19th century a short shrift. I?’ve read writers from the very beginning and end &

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January 21, 2003

The Temple of the Mind

The Temple of the Mind: Education and Literary Taste in Seventeenth-Century England by John R. Mulder. A compact, nicely focused &

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January 01, 2003

How to buy used books online

Books Do Furnish A Room started selling used books on the web because I?’d been buying them that way, mostly &

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August 29, 2002

Rereading Evelyn Waugh

My accomplishment of the day was taking out all the trash bags and washing the dishes. Arising after fifteen hours &

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August 01, 2002

Ada Leverson, Malcolm Bradbury, Tom Sharpe

Last week a customer asked me to suggest someone like Wodehouse. I made a few suggestions, Joe Keenan, Tom Sharpe &

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July 21, 2002

Was about Robert Heinlein but somehow wound up with anti-Semitism

This started as a comment on a comment in another's journal that mentioned Robert Heinlein in passing. I suspect he &

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