‘Jack Be Nimble: The Accidental Education of an Unintentional Director’ by Jack O’Brien
Jack Be Nimble: The Accidental Education of an Unintentional Director details Jack O’Brien’s induction into theater through the Association of Producing Artists (APA) Repertory Company , his movement from an actor into a director, and his emergence as a major presence in the theater world in the 1970s.
‘Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns’ by David Margolick
It’s a sadly familiar story in American literature: an alcoholic gay writer of great talent comes to a tragic end. Think Hart Crane. Think Charles Jackson. And now think John Horne Burns, the subject of David Margolick’s enlightening biography, Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns (Other Press).
‘Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father’ by Alysia Abbott
Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father (W.W. Norton & Company) by Alysia Abbott manages to pick up the nearly moribund genre of the AIDS memoir, give it a good dusting off, and then send it back out into the world with something like a fighting chance.
‘The Master of Us All: Balenciaga, His Workrooms, His World’ by Mary Blume
How does one write a biography of someone who has been dead for 40 years, was a bit of a recluse their whole life, and whom few people really knew. If you are Mary Blume, and the subject is Cristobal Balenciaga, one of fashion’s most unique designers, you focus on the fashion itself…
‘Harley Loco: A Memoir of Hard Living, Hair, and Post-Punk, from the Middle East to the Lower East Side’ by Rayya Elias
Millions of Syrian refugees have
‘The End of San Francisco’ by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Perhaps the greatest strength of the book is Sycamore’s ability to capture queer adolescence and immortalize that reality onto the page without sanitizing the struggles.
‘I Await the Devil’s Coming’ by Mary MacLane
Based solely on its title, I Await the Devil’s Coming (Melville House Publishing) sounds like a canonical text for Satanists. In reality, it’s the fiercely feminist, wickedly witty, and decidedly deranged glimpse into the life and thoughts of a transgressive young woman growing up unhappily in the Midwest at the beginning of the 20th century.
‘Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight? Confessions of a Gay Dad’ by Dan Bucatinsky
Families don’t just happen. Gay,
‘Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson’ by Blake Bailey
Blake Bailey has dissected complex, self-destructive literary lives in his biographies of Richard Yates and John Cheever, and Farther and Wilder will no doubt add to his reputation as the premiere chronicler of tormented American writers.
