Tidbits about books on the 2027 list

Now that we've collectively picked what we'll be reading next year, here are items contributed by BookMen DC members about two of them.

First up, courtesy of Lee Levine: The September Washington Beacon features an interview with Andrew Sean Greer, the author of Villa Coco--which we'll be discussing in December. Greer, a Maryland native, says his latest novel "is about old friendships and growing old and coming into yourself as a young person." He also admits Villa Coco is autobiographical "in a way."

Next, Ted Coltman kindly shared this Harvard Gazette interview with Douglas Stuart, author of John of John, which we'll discuss sometime next year. (We've already read Shuggie Bain, his breakout best-seller.)

This quote from the interview really stood out for me: “I wanted to write a novel about working-class men who love beauty,” Stuart said. “That was one of the first things I wanted to do. After my first two novels about gang violence and about the decline in the city, I wanted to also show that the working class were very capable of loving beauty in all its forms.”

Thanks, Lee and Ted!

BookMen DC's 2027 reading list

NOTE: This list includes books on the 2026 list that have not yet been scheduled (marked with one asterisk), as well as two new novels added by acclamation (marked with two asterisks). 

FICTION

Bath Haus: A Thriller by P.J. Vernon*

Creation by Gore Vidal

Enigma Variations by Andre Aciman

Finistère (Little Sister’s Classics Book 8) by Fritz Peters

Florenzer by Phil Melanson*

Hemlock and After by Angus Wilson*

Here the Whole Time by Vitor Martins, translated by Lorissa Helena

John of John by Douglas Stuart**

Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes by Henry Van Dyke

Lies with Man by Michael Nava*

Love Junkie by Robert Plunket*

Small Rain by Garth Greenwell*

The Beautiful Room Is Empty by Edmund White

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

The Disappearers by Marlon James**

The Wildes: A Novel in Five Acts by Louis Bayard*

Tramps Like Us by Joe Westmoreland

Villa Coco by Andrew Sean Greer

We the Animals by Justin Torres

NON-FICTION

American Scare: America’s Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives by Robert W. Fieseler*

The End of the Gay Rights Revolution by Roman McCrea

The Glamour Boys: The Secret Story of the Rebels Who Fought for Britain to Defeat Hitler by Chris Bryant

BIOGRAPHY/MEMOIR

Before Night Falls: A Memoir by Reinaldo Arenas, translated by Delores M. Koch*

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade*

I Felt the End Before It Came: Memoirs of a Queer Ex-Jehovah’s Witness by Daniel Allen Cox

The Einstein of Sex: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, Visionary of Weimar Berlin by Daniel Brook

Theater Kid: A Broadway Memoir by Jeffrey Sellers

PLAYS

Standing on Ceremony: The Gay Marriage Plays by Mo Gaffney, Jordan Harrison, Moisés Kaufman, Neil LaBute, Wendy MacLeod, José Rivera, Paul Rudnick and Doug Wright; conceived by Brian Shnipper

POETRY

After the Fall: Poems Old and New (Pitt Poetry Series) by Edward Field

The Tradition by Jericho Brown

ANTHOLOGIES

Lot: Stories by Bryan Washington

Quarantine: A Lyrical Debut–LGBTQ South Asian Short Stories of Family, Identity and Universal Humanity by Rahul Mehta

Some LGTBQ poetry to enjoy

It's been a while since I last compiled selections from the American Academy of Poetry's Poem-a-Day newsletter (not all by LGBTQ+ poets, I should note), so I'm playing catchup here. These poems were disseminated between July and October; enjoy!

On the far side of pleasure by Samuel Ace

[earth & blood & mining dam-burst.] by Lucas de Lima

Song for the Luddites by Lord George Gordon Byron

Roller Coaster, Lightning Storm by Wo Chan

32-inch Aubade with Captions by Meg Day

Zero Hour by Dare Williams

Spring and Fall by Gerald Manley Hopkins

The Storm Surge, 1981-1992 by Kimberly Reyes

An Evening Discussion by Chen Chen

[Watch any day his nonchalant pauses] by W.H. Auden

Independence Day by Ocean Vuong

Love Lies Bleeding by Christina Rossetti

Wish We Were Daddies by francine j. harris

Jasmines by Claude McKay

To Let this Woman Love Me by E. Hughes

Michael Chabon coins a word

The dozen of us who gathered last week to discuss the first four parts of Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), enjoyed a robust conversation about this epic book. During the discussion, I noted Chabon's coinage of the word "aetataurate" in Chapter 7 of Part IV (p. 340). Here is the sentence:

"During 1941, in the wake of that outburst of gaudy hopefulness, the World's Fair, a sizable portion of the citizens of New York City had the odd experience of feeling for the time in which they were living, at the very moment they were living in it, that strange blend of optimism and nostalgia which is the usual hallmark of the aetataurate delusion."

Even if you never took Latin, you could probably come up with a good guess of what the word means from the reference to nostalgia. But what I love about Chabon's nonce-word is that is he could have just said "golden age." Instead, he displayed the same love of language and wordplay that Sammy, Joe, Rosa and other characters in the novel do.

We'll discuss the last two sections of the novel on Nov. 4. Join us!

Librarians speak out

The New York Times recently interviewed dozens of attendees at the American Library Association's conference in Chicago, and published this compendium of short profiles. As the article notes, these librarians came from rural towns and major cities, elementary schools and universities, local branches and big government agencies.

Speaking as someone who worked in college libraries at a small institution (Centenary College, undergraduate) and a large one (George Washington University, grad school), I loved this heartwarming piece! It reminds me of so many librarians I've known over the years. So I wanted to share it with you all, even though it only has one interview centered on LGBTQ literature:

"A boy checked out a graphic novel about two boys who fall in love. He told me he’d never felt seen before in our tiny conservative Texas town. He was getting bullied and targeted for being who he was. The next year, when he went to high school, he sent me an email saying that having access to books like that made him feel seen and validated. He went on to shine."

Amanda Hunt, Central Texas school librarian

Thread weaving

When I posted the next two items, about Marlon James' novel, The Disappearers, and Nicholas Bogg's biography, Baldwin: A Love Story, I didn't know that the two authors have been partners since at least 2022 and live together. It's a small world, after all! 😃

Novel of the decade?

"With this novel about gay experience and murderous homophobia in Jamaica and elsewhere during the 1980s and ’90s, [Marlon] James has written a masterpiece, the novel of the decade and possibly of the century thus far."

That is how Dwight Garner opens his rave for Marlon James' latest novel, The Disappearers, in his New York Times review. Later, he says: "This is another way of saying The Disappearers was one of the signal reading experiences of my adult life. It sank knives deep into my heart. I’m still in recovery from it."

Although they generally haven't been quite that effusive, most other critics I've read concur with Garner's praise. One exception: Adam Mars-Jones, writing for the London Review of Books: "Somehow the book’s fierce purpose has been adulterated. Its portrait of a cruel society loses authority by including a made-up bogeyman, a hate figure exempted from any attempt at understanding. This does significant damage to a book whose harshness is only bearable if it is telling the truth."

Some of you may still recall our lively discussion back in 2020 of James' previous novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, which had similar heft and ambition. Some of us loved it, while others found it a joyless slog. I note that history because I will be nominating The Disappearers for next year's reading list, and anticipate it may elicit similarly passionate reactions. (Not that that's a bad thing! :-)