Items

• Unzipped : a novella and six short stories
  The opening line of the first short story in this collection, aptly illustrated by Tom of Finland (Touko Laaksonen), gives a representative flavour – “At fourteen, Vincent Conte didn’t know whether he had a big cock or an ordinary one – at fifteen, he found out”. The back cover blurb declares that “Through all seven pieces runs a single theme – the explicitly detailed celebration of male-male sex, the excitement, the romance, the fun of it”. One reviewer for Australian publication ‘OutRage’ was less impressed, however, stating that the illustrations were the most exciting part of the book. American author John Coriolan wrote several other erotic novels from the late 1960s onwards.
• What Dillinger meant to me
  This poetry collection from Robert Peters (1924-2014), his eighteenth, contains a mix of new poems and some that were published in earlier books and little magazines, such as ‘The Berkeley Poetry Review’. This volume is autobiographical, focussing on the poet’s childhood, family and society in rural Wisconsin during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The American gangster John Dillinger was involved in a shootout in the nearby Little Bohemia Lodge – his image adorned the young Peters’s bedroom wall, and he appears throughout this collection. Peters’s burgeoning sexuality is explored in poems such as ‘Tommy McQuaker’, about a local gay man who defiantly “walked like a woman down Main Street”, inspiring both fear and desire. Published by the Sea Horse Press, the book is dedicated to Peters’s parents.
• Winter music
  Set in the Philadelphia classical music scene of the late 1970s, Karen Rile’s first and only novel concerns gay concert flautist Lawrence Chatterjee, whose performance career has been cut short following an accident, and child flute prodigy Gabriel, who also loves Kool-Aid and the Beatles. Rile herself studied flute at university level, before going on to become a writer and journalist for publications including ‘The New York Times’, ‘The San Francisco Chronicle’ and ‘The Philadelphia Enquirer’, and her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in several literary magazines. She teaches fiction and creative nonfiction at the University of Pennsylvania.