When Peter met Paul

Peter Hujar is much better known today than his fellow artist and former lover Paul Thek, thanks in no small part to the acclaimed 2025 film, "Peter Hujar's Day."

But a new joint biography by Andrew Durbin, The Wonderful World that Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, sets out to do equal justice to both men. Here are an excerpt from Vulture and a book review in The New Republic.

By the way, if Hujar's name sounds vaguely familiar but you can't quite place him: One of his most famous photographs, "Orgasmic Man," graces the cover of Hanya Yanagihara's novel, A Little Life, which we read back in 2018.

Colm Toibin's latest

Over the years, we've discussed four books by Irish writer Colm Toibin: The Master (discussed in 2005), Love in a Dark Time (2006), The Empty Family (2012) and, most recently, The Magician (2023).

So far as I can tell from this laudatory review in The Guardian, Toibin's latest short story collection, The News from Dublin, does not contain any LGBTQ characters. But as with Lev Raphael, whose Secret Anniversaries of the Heart we'll be returning to next week, his writing is still powerful no matter what the subject matter is.

Speaking of which, here are two bonus tracks: an essay in The Guardian titled "I've Learned First-Hand How Evil Is Tolerated,"and a book review Toibin recently published in The New York Review of Books.

The Further Adventures of Gertrude Stein

Later this year, we'll discuss Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade, a literary biography of the enigmatic writer and larger-than-life personality.

In the meantime, I thought I'd share a review in The Guardian of a new book that takes a somewhat different approach to distilling Stein's legacy: My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, by Deborah Levy.

To quote the opening of the review: "The book doesn’t exactly have a plot, but there is a situation. Three female friends are in Paris. The narrator (English, single) is writing, or failing to write, an essay about Gertrude Stein. Eva (Spanish-Danish, married to a man in Seattle whom she sees once a week, if that, on FaceTime) is a graphic novelist. Fanny (French, polyamorous with three female lovers) is a financier." Color me intrigued!