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Casual cruising

  • BOOKS
  • by Tim Pfaff
  • Sep 3, 2019

In its subtitle, Alex Espinosa's new book, "Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime" (The Unnamed Press), "history" seems almost to relegate to the past the pleasures of what was a "pastime."

Stars come out for Amanda Lee Koe's debut

  • BOOKS
  • by Tim Pfaff
  • Aug 27, 2019

The brightest star of Amanda Lee Koe's debut novel "Delayed Rays of a Star" (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday) is Amanda Lee Koe. The queer, Singapore-born, New York-based Koe's book is one of those astronomical rarities people get up in the night to behold.

Ambition in the Green Zone: 'Correspondents'

  • BOOKS
  • by Tim Pfaff
  • Aug 24, 2019

I initially sensed a word play lurking in the title of Tim Murphy's new novel, "Correspondents" (Grove Press), but if so, it went past me.

Discovery of lost time: 'Tarare'

  • MUSIC
  • by Tim Pfaff
  • Aug 13, 2019

It's all-too-obvious how Antonio Salieri's 1787 opera "Tarare" could tickle the fancy of a politically inclined present-day director.

More lives of a cat in 'Crossing'

  • BOOKS
  • by Tim Pfaff
  • Aug 6, 2019

In author Pajtim Statovci'ssecond novel, "Crossing" (Pushkin Press), he has gone deeper. The territory is still the refugee experience, depicted with even more harrowing realism.

Gay men in velvet green

  • BOOKS
  • by Tim Pfaff
  • Jul 23, 2019

The rigors and satisfactions of living in remote places for a certain type of LGBTQ people are rarely articulated more artfully and artistically than they are in Mike Parker's "On the Red Hill."

Second novelist tells all

  • BOOKS
  • by Tim Pfaff
  • Jul 16, 2019

Only the excellence of Nicole Dennis-Benn's writing got me all the way through her second novel, "Patsy" (Liveright).

'The Flight Portfolio': Art for life's sake

  • BOOKS
  • by Tim Pfaff
  • Jul 9, 2019

"The Flight Portfolio" re-enacts the doings of the US-fostered Emergency Rescue Commission, sanctioned by Eleanor Roosevelt, dedicated to getting the persecuted out of the clutches of the Nazis and to safe ground, particularly in the U.S.

Debut story of a different man

  • BOOKS
  • by Tim Pfaff
  • Jun 25, 2019

"Every stage of my life feels like a story of a different man," the protagonist in Ahmal Danny Ramadan's "The Clothesline Swing" (Indigo Press) remarks, "each one a man I don't know well."

Mahler marvels

  • MUSIC
  • by Tim Pfaff
  • Jun 18, 2019

As would only be fitting, MTT, our own private Merlin of Mahler, is crafting his farewell season as music director of the SF Symphony around two major pillars of the composer's output, the Sixth and Eighth Symphonies.

The way men do: 'On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous'

  • BOOKS
  • by Tim Pfaff
  • Jun 11, 2019

Surely one of the last things Ocean Vuong thought he'd become is topical, and hotly so.

Boy destroyed

  • BOOKS
  • by Tim Pfaff
  • May 28, 2019

It's hard to imagine the reader of Damian Barr's debut novel "You Will Be Safe Here" (Bloomsbury Publishing) who doesn't sense that the title portends the opposite.

Young love & its bittersweet aftermath

  • BOOKS
  • by Tim Pfaff
  • May 21, 2019

"Lie with Me" (Scribner) is as immediately involving and heart-breaking a tale of gay first love as I can recall.

Three queens & an ace

  • BOOKS
  • by Tim Pfaff
  • May 7, 2019

I've wearied of the too-oft-repeated Joan Didion quote, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." In a warmer voice all his own, Dustin Lance Black has given it a new lease on life with his memoir, "Mama's Boy: A Story from Our Americas."

Everybody must get stoned

  • BOOKS
  • by Tim Pfaff
  • Apr 30, 2019

In the part of his life that begins after the events chronicled in his new book "The Light Years" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Chris Rush has become known as a painter.

It's curtains for Joy

  • BOOKS
  • by Tim Pfaff
  • Apr 23, 2019

Christopher Castellani's deeply felt new "Leading Men" (Viking) exhibits another compelling aurora.

Cold in Key West

  • BOOKS
  • by Tim Pfaff
  • Apr 9, 2019

I read my way sequentially through Michael Carroll's new short story collection, "Stella Maris and Other Key West Stories" (Turtle Point Press).

Promiscuous living comes to light

  • BOOKS
  • by Tim Pfaff
  • Apr 2, 2019

"Luminous Traitor: The Just and Daring Life of Roger Casement" (UC Press) is a deeply informed biographical novel, skillfully told in present tense, that brings a lesser-known historical era and its principal actors.

Houston confidential

  • BOOKS
  • by Tim Pfaff
  • Mar 26, 2019

The stories in "Lot" are free-standing but cycle around the family fable of a first-person narrator Nic (Nicolas), whose name is revealed grudgingly.

South Bend's rising star Pete Buttigieg

  • BOOKS
  • by Tim Pfaff
  • Mar 22, 2019

You can judge both the book and the subject by the cover of Pete Buttigieg's new autobiography, "Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future" (Liveright).