GLR November-December 2024

B R I E F S vent to,” says the narrator of “The Blunts That Bond Us.” “I’m not one to talk about my internal turmoil.”

“Time becomes the greatest editor. The only way to get things done is to finish.” Back stories by pioneering journalists are quite satisfying, such as excerpts from Wes ley Morris’ discursive “My Mustache, My Self,” a 2020 essay in The New York Times on Black identity and masculinity. Also fun are Morris’ snippets gleaned from notes written in the dark while viewing films. Other pho tographers, architects, chefs, puzzle masters, songwriters, radio hosts, sculptors, and graphic designers complement the treasure trove. The appendix is chock-a-block full of glorious artifacts, including handwritten revi sions of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass . J OHN K ILLACKY ROUGH TRADE by Katrina Carrasco MCD. 385 pages, $28. I’m not familiar with the Pacific Northwest and didn’t know that Tacoma, Washington, is a busy port city. In the late 19th century, in fact, its port was at the heart of the opium drug trade, if you’re to believe the world imaginatively created by Katrina Carrasco in Rough Trade, her second book in a series about opium trader Alma Rosales. The de tails of this elaborately invented world feel as real as anything you’d see in front of you. It’s a world that’s colorful, reckless, dangerous, and sexy. Alma oversees a crew responsible for de livering large amounts of opium, but she does so using the persona of Jack Camp, a male lieutenant within the organized crime ring running the drug trade. Trouble arrives when law enforcement investigates a mur der on the docks and comes perilously close to sniffing out the drug trade. The main ac tion of the book is Alma/Jack’s efforts to prevent that from happening. There’s action also in the town’s queer bar, Monte Carlo, where gender bending is welcome and where Alma feels at home. The novel is most interesting when Alma interacts with her ex-lover Bess, a former detective with the Pinkerton agency. The story of Alma and Bess can be found in the first book in this series, The Best Bad Things, though you don’t need to have read the first book to enjoy the second. Delphina, the boss of the organized crime outfit run ning the opium trading, also has a complex relationship with Alma. With both women, questions of loyalty, trust, betrayal, love, and lust are tossed around with plenty of clever dialog. This and the intricate world building are the strengths of the novel, which benefits greatly from its setting in time and place. A NNE L AUGHLIN

EXIT WOUNDS by Lewis DeSimone

Rebel Satori Press. 371 pages, $22.95 Without resorting to rose-colored glasses, Exit Wounds unabashedly sings the praises of San Francisco. In Lewis DeSimone’s novel, it’s the adopted home of Craig, a fifty-some thing gay man who moved there from Min nesota in the 1990s. A bit of a commitment-phobe, Craig is single. He man ages a bookstore threatened by redevelop ment. His realtor friend is urging him to cash in on his now overpriced condo near the Cas tro, but Craig likes it where he is, within walking distance to the bars that he and his friends still frequent, less for pickups these days than for group chats over martinis. These chats sometimes become bitch ses sions. The city has gone to hell. The Castro has lost its luster, partly due to the death and devastation of AIDS. Painted-lady charm and sexiness has been replaced by gentrification and workaholism. Young gay people are ignorant of their own recent past. Abundant sexual pairing has given away to long-term relationships and diminished li bidos. So Craig and his small circle of mostly longtime friends often meet over drinks and meals, at bars in living rooms and tiny gardens, and fall into the urban good life that comes from old flames, loves lost, partners made, and friendships that have survived the years. A subplot about a criminal case on which Craig serves as a juror seems a bit inconsequential, but DeSi mone handles those scenes with dispatch and brings us back to his story of enduring friendships in a fast-changing city. C LAUDE P ECK BAD SEED: Stories by Gabriel Carle Translated by Heather Houde The Feminist Press at CUNY. 120 pages, $15.95 Pre-recovery, pre-therapy, the young, queer characters in BadSeed , Gabriel Carle’s first collection of short stories published in Eng lish, have not yet sorted out their passions. The geographic center of these eight stories is the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan, specifically the theater steps, where Carle’s narrators and their friends—“the Bad Decision Club”—meet between classes. They are humanities students who study Romance languages and literary the ory. Some got kicked out of the house, some can’t make tuition, some do bong hits, then work it off on the dance floor. Despite con stant oversharing in the group chat, these young gay, trans, and nonbinary people suf fer their problems alone. “I have no one to

While the characters go quiet with each other, Carle’s prose stays loud, and we hear it all—desperation, nihilism, anguish, obses sion—in language that swells to excess. Magical weed in “Casablanca Kush” smells “super-extra fruity, a mix of strawberry-or ange-lemon-mango.” The narrator of “In the Bathhouse” imagines being “burnt at the stake and vomiting demons in a nameless, timeless forest and watching a tribe push a giant fireball out of the mouth of an erupt ing volcano.” Carle’s hyperbolic style con veys the bloat of overconsumption that their characters experience—of TV, games, social media, porn, drugs—but the piling on of words can be tedious. There’s excess in the storytelling, too. “Casablanca Kush” starts as postcolonial magical realism but devolves into Marvel like fanfiction. In “Devilwork,” a metafic tion, two sketched tales spiral into farcical porn involving goats, college professors, and ring lights. While each story in Bad Seed has a throughline that matters, it is often buried by excess. L ORI O’D EA THE WORK OF ART How Something Comes from Nothing by Adam Moss Penguin Press. 431 pages, $45. Adam Moss’ book is a collection of inter views with 43 artists, many of them gay, on how they make their work, using iconic ex amples to illuminate their process. The au thor’s aim is “to render the experience of creativity—that is, the frustration, elation, regret, first glimmers, second thoughts, dis tress, and triumph that leads to works of art.” Conversations are augmented with notebook entries, napkin doodles, early sketches, reams of false starts, iPhone pho tos, lyric fragments, and other ephemera il lustrating the alchemical process of artistic conjuring . Tenacity and resilience abound throughout this beautifully designed compendium. Au thor Michael Cunningham shares multiple drafts of what became his Pulitzer Prize winning TheHours . Tony Kushner details free associations, chance happenings, practi cal constraints, and deep listening to his characters (“I was just taking dictation”) as Angels in America develops. The late Stephen Sondheim recalled dropping a song from Company for its out-of-town tryout and having one week to come up with “Getting Married Today.” Fashion designer Marc Ja cobs proclaims the virtue of deadlines:

TheG & LR

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