In “The Private Library,” Mr. Byers goes to the heart of why physical books continue to beguile us. Individually, they are frequently useful or delightful, but it is when books are displayed en masse that they really work wonders. Covering the walls of a room, piled up to the ceiling and exuding the breath of generations, they nourish the senses, slay boredom and relieve distress.
The celebrity cookbook is a curious genre: its essential premise is that a person who is famous for something other than cooking can, on the basis of that fame, also teach us how to cook. At the same time, it’s a tried-and-true publishing gambit: Gwyneth Paltrow and Stanley Tucci are following in the footsteps of Sophia Loren, Patti LaBelle, and, fabulously, Liberace.
My favorite celebrity cookbook addresses this disjuncture right in the jacket copy. A note from the author confesses, “I’ve always wanted to write a cookbook. There’s just one problem. Moi doesn’t cook … moi eats!” It’s the unmistakable voice of Miss Piggy.
It was at this book stall that I found my first gay book. No, not found, but discovered, for it felt like something that landed serendipitously in my hands, a gift and a weapon, a fount of secret knowledge, something born out of the unknown. What book was it? It could have been Paul Monette’s Afterlife, or Neil Bartlett’s Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall – it could have been either, or something else entirely. There, at the very bottom of a stack, tucked out of sight, where the covers scraped the filthy floor, were these books. And there, on the back covers, as I carefully read every word, were the words I didn’t know I needed until I read them. A secret . . . pretended to be the same as everyone else . . . to come out . . . a gay. I noted the prices on the front inside page of each book – all the same – and put them back neatly, spines aligned, nothing out of place.
Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and Jamaica Kincaid are all known for vividly chronicling the lives of Black women. Glory Edim’s decision to compile their works in “On Girlhood,” a compelling anthology that also includes contemporary writers such as Amina Gautier and Alexia Arthurs, results in a literary master class.
For Sophie Calle, art is provocation. This applies to both the artist and her audience. In a career spanning more than 40 years, she has blurred the lines between observation and intrusion, documentary and narrative, producing books, films, installations, interventions. “The Hotel,” her most recent work to appear in English, represents a case in point: It’s a book that records an ongoing process of surveillance, in which Calle “was hired as a temporary chambermaid for three weeks in a Venetian hotel. I was assigned twelve bedrooms on the fourth floor. In the course of my cleaning duties, I examined the personal belongings of the hotel guests and observed, through details, lives which remained unknown to me.”
And after resisting the idea as long as I could, I have to confess that his book, even with the inside-joke title of “Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli” (an improvised line in the movie), captured me with its joyful energy, extensive research and breathless enthusiasm.
King writes acutely, and sometimes heartbreakingly, about her developing sexuality, the cues she took from pop culture about how to make herself more desirable for consumption and how the models of sex positivity from the era (think Samantha Jones in “Sex and the City”) left out so much, which she would discover on her own in painful ways.