The Penguin Book of International Gay Writing

by Mark Mitchell (Introduction), David Leavitt (Introduction)

Stories and excerpts by and about gay men includes selections by Petronius, the Marquis de Sade, Honore de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Robert Musil, Andre Gide, Thomas Mann, Jean Cocteau, Albert Camus, Yukio Mishima, Manuel Puig, and Roland Barthes

Genres: Gay, Historical Fiction, LGBT, Anthologies, Fiction, Short Stories, Queer

608 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1995

Reviews

[George Ilsley · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection that generally proceeds chronologically, starting from the primordial ooze (or rather, the Greeks) and proceeding up to mid last century. Some of the selections are puzzling, given the mandate, even for someone as supposedly adept at reading between the lines as I imagine myself being.

Death in Venice is included in its entirety, certainly a quirky choice since it is widely available. That 80 pages could have been allocated to other, more obscure selections. All in all, one must conclude that the term "gay writing" seems to signify very little here. At least the term "international" achieves a degree of meaning.

I've been working my way through this volume very very slowly. At first I poked away here and there, but then started from the beginning and have been reading it in order. I confess, however, to skipping "Death in Venice", since I re-read that novella not so very long ago. Really, I must ask again, what were the editors thinking?

.... OK, now I've finished. There are some perplexing choices, like the excerpt from Camus's classic The Plague, that does not seem to advance the concerns of the editors (to illuminate relationships between men) except in the most general terms. Hemingway could be included here on those grounds, for crying out loud. Also, "The Plague" too is widely available.

I enjoyed most the authors whom I discovered here. I wish there had been 10 more obscure writers brought to light instead of dedicating pages to "Death in Venice" and "The Plague." The unknown authors were the ones I enjoyed re-reading here, because otherwise they are hard to stumble across, and discovery is part of what makes an anthology wonderful.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love anthologies so I am predisposed to like this book but I do have reservations - I really don't think they needed to include Death in Venice - even at the time of publication it was a work readily available in libraries or to buy - far better to have included Mann's Tonio Kroger story - at least it would have been new to more readers. Also I can not fathom why an excerpt from Camus's 'The Plague' was included. The author was not gay or bisexual (as far as I know) he wasn't involved in gay activism nor did he even write about gay or related matters. And The Plague is not a 'gay' book - of course it was seen by many as prefiguring what AIDS was or became but that is reading backwards, I don't think it is really appropriate. I think the space could have been put to better use an excerpt from Michael Kuzmin's 'Wings' for example (although there might not have been an English translation available and it might have been difficult to except a sufficiently obvious 'gay' scene) or Adolfo Caminha's 'Bom Crioulo: The Black man and the Cabin Boy' which had been translated into English in 1982 - that is a gay book deserving a larger audience - not only a very open and explicit 19th century 'gay' novel from Brazil but one were the hero is a black man - not many of those spring to mind even today.

I also think that far more information could have been given about the various authors, why a particular work was chosen, etc. I know there are extensive acknowledgements and credits but still it is not always easy to find out information on, for example, the Prison Song in Prose by Gérard Reeve which appears to have been written in English, though the author usually wrote in Dutch but nothing is said anywhere in the book about this.

These may seem small flaws in an anthology that introduces so many excellent authors but I think the wasting of space on Death in Venice and the Plague was a serious mistake and kept many other deserving authors out and, if an anthology is introducing the reader to new authors then it should be possible to easily track down full works by those authors.

By the way if I am in error about my understanding of Camus or the Plague then I will of course correct this review.

[Franchesca]

The Various Faces of Gay Writing including works that are hard to find if not published today.