Dario Bellezza-Italy's first openly gay, major prizewinning poet-novelist-playwright-was a bold, daring writer who energetically explored love, sexual transformation, and death. Bellezza embraced a variety of forms, from unabashed love-lyric to political narrative, and the fervor of his voice makes a compelling argument for his lasting importance ......
Set in Madison, Wisconsin, and New Haven, Connecticut, in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, Mourning Light is a semi-autobiographical love story. Our narrator, Reb (so named by his mother because of her love of the Daphne du Maurier novel Rebecca), is hounded by guilt over the death of his lover, Anthony, which took place on the same day Reb ......
A fiercely honest exploration of the risks and rewards of contemporary relationships-and hookups-Sex with Strangers embraces the dizzying power of attraction across the spectrum of passion and infatuation. In this fearless collection, lust and loneliness drive a diverse cast of queer and straight characters into sometimes precarious entanglements. ......
Poetry and Readers in the Golden Age of Russian Literature
For many nineteenth-century Russians, poetry was woven into everyday life-in conversation and correspondence, scrapbook albums, and parlor entertainments. Blending close literary analysis with social and cultural history, Daria Khitrova shows how poetry lovers of the period all became nodes in a vast network of literary appreciation and ......
Adherents to the ""zar"" cult in northern Sudan encounter spirits that are parallels of historically relevant figures in the known human world. Those possessed, usually women, meet aliens who speak about issues confronting a village such as the increasing influence of formal Islam or encroaching Western economic domination. By manifesting spirits ......
Emil Draitser dreamed of becoming a writer. Born to a working-class Jewish family in the USSR on the eve of World War II, he came of age during the Brezhnev era, often considered the nadir of Soviet culture. Bored with an engineering job, he found refuge in writing, attracting the attention of a Moscow editor who encouraged him to try his hand at ......
Budapest at the fin de siecle was famed and emulated for its cosmopolitan urban culture and nightlife. It was also the second-largest Jewish city in Europe. Mary Gluck delves into the popular culture of Budapest's coffee houses, music halls, and humor magazines to uncover the enormous influence of assimilated Jews in creating modernist Budapest ......
Socialism, Zionism, and Antisemitism from 1892 to 1992
Alessandra Tarquini, an expert in Italian Fascism, untangles the complicated relationship between the Italian Left and Jews since the late nineteenth century. Due largely to indifference, and sometimes to antisemitism, Italian leftists consistently overlooked Jews in their visions for a collectivist future. Yet, from the birth of the Socialist ......
As the West liberalized its stance on sexuality and gender between 2000 and 2020, Vladimir Putins Russia moved in the opposite direction, remolding the performance of Russian citizenship according to a neoconservative agenda characterized by increasingly exaggerated gender roles. By connecting gendered and sexualized citizenship to developments ......
