Reviews for Unlimited embrace

The average rating for Unlimited embrace based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-03-31 00:00:00 Ladd Biro Reed Woodhouse has done the small group of us interested in reading quality gay men's literary fiction a tremendous service with this unique book, and in two ways. The first is obviously in presenting to us his in-depth intellectual analyses of the key works of gay fiction from the end of World War II until the verge of the 21st century. This includes, for example, James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, James Purdy's Narrow Rooms, Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge, and Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man - all of which I also enthusiastically rank at the top of the canon. Yes he writes with deep literary knowledge and analytical skill, and yes it has to be read carefully. But all the work richly pays off with a well-earned understanding of what the good and great authors can create. Also analyzed in illuminating depth is Neil Bartlett's Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall. Anyone wanting an unbashfully romantic and unshamefully sexual book about how and why we live our lives as gay men cannot miss this book. It is the best statement I know why we shouldn't forget the painful history of where we came from to get to today's not necessarily better assimilation with heterosexual culture. The second service Woodhouse's book does for us is unintentional and ironic. He marked a significant point in time by closing his book, written in 1998, with the radiantly hopeful observation that "...gay fiction has become more prolific and available. It used to be that a bimonthly trip to the Glad Day Bookstore in Boston was sufficient...No longer. Hundreds of gay books come out of one sort or another every year." The sad irony is, of course, that this trend did not continue quite as he expected. The Glad Day bookstore closed along with nearly all other gay bookstores in the country - the latest (in 2011) being A Different Light on Castro Street in San Francisco, and a damnable shame. These bookstores were killed by the current ubiquity of unedited Internet self-published work and the resulting tidal wave of lowbrow, nearly identical, derivative and shallow coming-out stories and male romance novels which overwhelm what is left of the gay fiction market. And the major publishers of gay literature using real books made of paper gave up shortly after his book was published. So we are left mining the old stock. This is not such a bad thing. Along with Woodhouse, there are several other authors who have surveyed the historic gay literary scene from differing points of view including The Lost Library by Tom Cardamone, Lost Gay Novels by Anthony Slide, A History of Gay Literature by Gregory Woods, Pages Passed from Hand to Hand by Mark Mitchell and David Leavitt, and Fifty Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read by Richard Canning. It is certainly true more than ever as the nineteen-year-old character Boy says in Bartlett's Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall, "I am acquiring a library. I must have a future." What's changed since that wonderful book was published in 1990 is that the library will not contain much of anything written by the current authors of gay literary fiction, if indeed there are any. And can we realistically hope that any teenager is actually reading a book for pleasure today much less building a library? Woodhouse, and by extension the canonical gay fiction authors he analyzes, unintentionally show us how much has changed in only a decade or two.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-02-23 00:00:00 Matthew Bradstock I've been away from literary criticism too long it seems. I found this book very difficult to complete. The writing was too literary, too much like a college thesis than an accessible book for the public. It does have a long index of important gay authors, but don't choose this book if you're put off by an academic approach. I have to admit I was disappointed.