96 Hours, by Georgia Beers. Bywater Books, 224 pages, $14.95 paper.

The plot is standard stuff. Erica is an emotionally closed-off corporate drone, Abby is a flighty travel junky who just can’t settle down. Do opposites, eventually, attract? Well, yes – and that’s not a spoiler. What sets Beers’ smooth romance apart from the deluge of falling-in-love stories from any number of lesbian presses is the book’s unusual setting: Gander, Newfoundland, the small Canadian town where dozens of America-bound airplanes – and thousands of unsettled passengers – set down when flights into and over U.S. airspace were banned the morning of 9/11. As befits the basic romance, Erica and Abby are positive/negative personalities, repelling each other at first, before circling warily, then finally warming to each other. Beers’ use of Gander as the setting for a 9/11 story, a decade after that searing reality, packs a different kind of emotional wallop than other stories using the terrorist tragedy as a backdrop; the horrific news is filtered through scattered TV sets, while the generosity of small-town Canadians comforting frightened, bewildered refugees becomes the story’s centerpiece.

Sacred Monsters, by Edmund White. Magnus Books, 256 pages, $24.95 hardcover.

In an ideal world, any queer teenager or young adult with an interest in the arts would have this collection of essays and observations close to hand. White’s miniature portraits of the likes of David Hockney, E.M. Forster or Reynolds Price – many are 10 pages or less – read like fully fleshed biographies, infusing the book with both critical substance and a sense of history. But the collection blossoms into something even better when White weaves autobiographical elements through many pieces: a quirky afternoon shared with Truman Capote, a young White’s encounter with elder author Glenway Wescott, a critical analysis of Paul Bowles set against the author’s feckless, loving trip through Morocco with his dying lover. Several of the essays, though primarily astute critical commentary, are peppered with colorful moments: "The Making of John Rechy" is mostly about Rechy’s several books, but White also recounts a dinner with Rechy and a female film star in which the author and the actress vied with each other to see which of them could turn the most men’s heads.

 Remembering Christmas, by Tom Mendicino, Frank Anthony Polito and Michael Salvatore. Kensington Books, 256 pages, $15 paper.

Given its Christmas theme, sales for this three-novella collection are likely to peak around the ho-ho holiday. Too bad – it has year-round quality. In Tom Mendicino’s contribution, "Away, In a Manger," the holiday moment comes when older man James meets younger man Jason on Christmas Eve, when James’ car breaks down on his way to dinner with his elderly West Virginia parents; their meeting – and subsequent seven-year relationship – is preceded by the author’s feisty account of Manhattan’s catty queer upper crust. In Frank Anthony Polito’s "A Christmas to Remember," college boys Jack and Kirk seem destined to be nothing more than best queer buddies until a holiday encounter away from campus opens their eyes – and their arms and their loins – to each other. In Michael Salvatore’s "Missed Connections," the most poignant of the three, Theo, dumped just before the holidays by his Grindr-obsessed boyfriend, finds himself trapped in an airport on Christmas Eve, where he encounters a childhood friend – but is wise enough not to rekindle an old flame.

Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1880-1918, edited and translated by Laird M. Easton. Alfred A. Knopf, 960 pages, $45 hardcover.

According to the index, homosexuality is mentioned on just four pages of this hefty tome. In his illuminating introduction, editor and translator Laird notes that Kessler "tiptoes around the subject of his own sexual feelings." But any discerning reader will know that the author of these fascinating diary entries, begun when he was 12 years old (and smitten by another young boy) and ending in 1918, was a man drawn to men. Kessler was a near-daily diarist up to his death in 1938, but his earlier journals were thought long los, until the lease expired in 1983 on a bank safety deposit box. This careful translation, a riveting, brilliant behind-the-scenes look at an aristocratic life that was already fading, reveals Kessler to be a man who was everywhere and knew everyone: H.G Wells and Andre Gide, Isadora Duncan and Jean Cocteau, Claude Monet and Aleister Crowley, Paul Verlaine and Edvard Munch – even Wilbur, one of the Wright brothers. Despite its weight, it’s not easy to put down this extraordinary mix of witness to history and gossip of the day.

Featured Excerpt

Stendahl once said that writing should not be a full-time job, and John Cheever’s unhappy life seems to lend substance to his remark. He had too much free time, too much creative energy, too many hours to feel lonely or to drink or to get up to sexual mischief that he immediately regretted. He was both a reckless hedonist and a starchy puritan, just as he was also a freelance with pretensions to being a country squire, both unfortunate combinations. Oh – and have I mentioned that he was bisexual? And a self-hating little guy who was always ripping off his clothes at parties and plunging into the pool, then mourning his exhibitionism and his small penis in his journals the next morning?

– from "The Strange Charms of John Cheever," in Sacred Monsters, by Edmund White.

Footnotes

GILBERT ADAIR, THE SEXUALLY ambiguous author of a number of gay-themed novels, died in early December in London, a year after being blinded by a stroke. His 1988 debut novel, The Holy Innocents, told the story of two Frenchmen, twins and lovers, reveling in an increasingly sadistic menage a trois with a 19-year-old American lad. The novel was de-gayed by Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci for his 2003 film, The Dreamers, and Adair then rewrote the novel, based on the film’s script, and republished it with the same title as the film. His two other best-known novels are 1998’s Love and Death on Long Island, about an aging male academic’s romantic obsession with a young male movie star, and 2003’s Buenas Noches Buenos Aires, about an inexperienced gay man faking sexual prowess among his queer schoolboy peers as AIDS starts to afflict them... GAY LIB PIONEER Arthur Evans, whose 1978 book from Fag Rag, Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture, was a bestselling critique of organized religion’s attitudes toward gays, died in September in San Francisco, of heart failure, at age 68. He was a pivotal figure in the early post-Stonewall days, active in both the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) In New York City before relocating to the West coast. Evans was also the author of Critique of Patriarchal Reasoning (White Crane Books, 1997).