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, only contains one LGBTQ character. 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!

Happy 100th Birthday, Frank O'Hara!

I am indebted to Ron Charles for the reminder in his Substack that Frank O’Hara was born on March 27, 1926. Charles notes that The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, edited by Donald Allen, won a National Book Award in 1972, six years after the poet was struck by a car and died at 40.

Back in 2014, we read perhaps his best-known collection, Lunch Poems. A decade before that, we read Joe LeSueur's Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara. And just five years ago, we read Brad Gooch's biography of the poet, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara (highly recommended).

I've also posted several items here about O'Hara over the years, which you can (re)read by clicking on this link.

Following in LeSueur's footsteps, here is a poetic tribute to O'Hara by a Somali-American poet, Laden Osman.

Some thoughts on "Hawk Mountain"

Because he lives in Russia, our friend Jacob Green is unable to attend BookMen meetings in person, but he has attended one Zoom session (so far) even though it happened in the wee hours for him. But as soon as I announced we'd be reading Connor Habib's Hawk Mountain, which we'll discuss on April 8, he ordered the book and posted a review on his own blog.

I'm only going to quote one paragraph here because the review contains a major spoiler. But once you've finished the novel, I encourage you to check out the rest of Jacob's thoughts.

"I have every reason to believe that Hawk Mountain is deeply personal for Conner Habib, its author. For example, there is a passage where Jack shares his sense of a family in the army. It has a very special meaning to me because my father is a military officer. 'To my father, who left me at the age of 3'—these exact words I used on the dedication page of my coming-out novel, Truth with Ornaments."

Thanks, Jacob!

Life after Book World

Over the years, I've quoted Ron Charles, the distinguished former Washington Post "Book World" reviewer, many times in posts on this blog.

The bad news, as I presume most of you already know, is that last month, the Post discontinued "Book World" (along with the entire sports section and other parts of the newspaper). That's actually the second time the paper has done that in this century; talk about cancel culture! (I fear there will be no third resurrection, however.)

Here is the New York Times' account of a Feb. 22 gathering at Politics & Prose held to celebrate Book World's legacy and mourn its discontinuation.

The good news is that Ron Charles is now on Substack. Like most other writers on that site, he offers a good deal of content for free, but I signed up as a paid subscriber to get the full experience, and highly recommend his work.

More good news: As a paid subscriber, I can issue free one-month subscriptions to five recipients. Because I want to give dibs to current BookMen, I'll put the relevant sign-up info into my next weekly missive.

Here's a sample Substack column, "Do I Still Matter?," that I hope will pique your interest.

ReQueered reading

When you finish the final short story in Felice Picano's Slashed to Ribbons in Defense of Love and Other Stories, which we'll be discussing on March 18, I encourage you not to close the book. The "About ReQueered Tales" postscript is worth reading in its own right, and it leads into a list of 15 other titles the publishing house has issued. The first several novels are also by the prolific Picano, but Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Stan Leventhal, Brian Bouldrey, Nikki Baker, Matt Lubbers-Moore, Ian Young and Lev Raphael (the author of another short story collection we're currently enjoying) are also represented.