Over at the New Yorker‘s Page-Turner blog, I write about stumbling across War in Heaven, a 1930 novel by Charles Williams about satanism, publishing, and the Holy Grail.
The dress I’ll be going to the party in
I’m pleased to introduce the cover to my forthcoming novel, Necessary Errors, which will be published by Penguin as a paperback original and an e-book in August. The cover is visible at the top of the right-hand column of this webpage—it’s the one in light blue. If you click on it, or if you direct your browser to steamthing.com/necessaryerrors, you’ll be led to a webpage for the book, hosted on this blog, which reprints the advance praise that a few early readers have been kind enough to send along.
Also, for the very curious, below is what the jacket for the advance reader’s copy looks like. It has what are known as French flaps, as the finished book will—though the finished book will look slightly different in other respects.
State of the gay nation
This is a bit after the fact, but for the sake of completeness in self-archiving, here’s my appearance on 30 January 2013 on WBUR’s “On Point with Tom Ashbrook.” The show was about what it’s like to be gay in America today, and I was one of those playing the role of native informant.
Stalker
I review James Lasdun’s Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked in the 4 March 2013 issue of The Nation.
A hand-painted rose, as a bookplate
This hand-drawn and hand-painted bookplate is in a copy of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse that I bought last year. Note the preliminary pencilling, still visible beneath the ink, of both the signature and the flower. Extrapolating from an obituary that I found online, it seems that in 1953, when Helen Costello Chase was nineteen, she was dancing with the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet in London. Later she became a florist and a painter. “Her mode of transportation was not automobile but ballet slipper,” her eulogist declares.