I know I'm leading with a tautology here, but I've never before read a book anything like "What's Left of the Night" (New Vessel Press).

Lambda Award-winning author Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore draws from her time spent living in Boston in 1995 to inform "Sketchtasy," a coming-of-age novel.

Walking around a bookstore often yields wonderful surprises for shoppers, especially for those looking for solutions to the challenges of holiday giving.

The potent new memoir "Amateur" (Scribner) is by Thomas Page McBee, an American trans man whose journey took him to Madison Square Garden — in the ring.

It's a Barbie world where the boys rule on thrones laden with sequined pink fabric.

Fiction frontier: "The Caregiver" (Simon & Schuster), the gripping final novel by the late gay novelist and filmmaker Samuel Park (who died of stomach cancer at the age of 41 in 2017), draws on his Brazilian birthplace.

"Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century" (UC Press) never resorts to the sensational to be gripping, compassionate and itself intellectually fluid.

On the eve of this historic and Very Important Election, we can't say it better than Hans the Franz does with his spectacular outfit. He's out there in the Castro District streets, resplendent in his declamatory onesie, and it's all to get out the vote.

In the case of Dale Peck's new novel, "Night Soil" (Soho Press), forget everything you think about the Dale Peck of the past.

Whether it was glam rock or punk rock, Reed was a precursor, if not the godfather, of musical styles and rock-n-roll movements.

Houston native Michael Arceneaux's debut memoir "I Can't Date Jesus" is bold, brassy, and unapologetically frank.

There is a chilling scene in the first chapter of Rebecca Makkai's new novel "The Great Believers" where the main character, Yale Tishman, is attending a memorial party in 1985 for a close friend, Nico, who has died of AIDS.

Poet Rafael Campo's "Comfort Measures Only" gathers 88 poems, many of which are new and unpublished, with the remainder drawn from other books of his works.

Prolific poet and writer Jim Elledge's "The Boys of Fairy Town: Sodomites, Female Impersonators, Third-Sexers, Pansies, Queers and Sex Morons in Chicago's First Century" (Chicago Review) picks up where St Sukie de la Croix's "Chicago Whispers" left off.