50 Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read

In a wide-ranging group of essays by some of today’s most outstanding novelists, writers, and critics, Fifty Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read insists on the importance of these fifty titles to all readers but also challenges our own bookshelves to make room for new arrivals. Some familiar names—Melville, Plato, Sappho, Rimbaud—are seen afresh, while others will be unfamiliar books waiting to be discovered.

Jonathan Franzen pays tribute to James Purdy's macabre masterpiece, Eustace Chisholm and the Works. Alison Smith remembers coming out with Colette. Christopher Bram revisits Thomas Mann's disturbing tale of improper desire, Death in Venice, and Regina Marler inquisitions Henry James over the women of The Bostonians. A host of distinct, radically unalike names speak out—from Aaron Hamburger's witty gay take on the “Book of Samuel” to Jane DeLynn on the true story of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway; from Edmund White on Marguerite Yourcenar's extraordinary reanimation of Emperor Hadrian to the late Kathy Acker, getting off with William Burroughs's Wild Boys. Find out which books have beguiled Mark Merlis, Stella Duffy, Andrew Holleran, Bob Smith, Randall Kenan, Carol Anshaw, Jim Grimsley, Felice Picano and many more.

Richard Canning is the author and editor of nine books, including two books in the Between Men series. He lives in London, where he writes and lectures on LGBT literature.