PASSPORT’s Favorite Books For Summer 2024

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Check out “Radiant, The Life and Line of Keith Haring” offers an illuminating portrait of the iconic artist, capturing his vibrant creativity and social activism. Go west with Bret Easton Ellis’ “Shards” where he dives deep into the dark underbelly of 1980’s Los Angeles and take in Sven Holm’s “Termush” a chilling dystopian tale that examines the fragility of civilization and the human condition in a post-apocalyptic world.

You are surely touched by Terpsichore. Whether you’re a late night clubber or a balletomane, a Zumba class-goer or an old school voguer, a country-western two-stepper or a bedroom mirror rump shaker, dance is a part of your life. Dance’s inherent combination of physicality and self-expression gives it particular resonance with queer people, whether as professional performers, leisure participants, or simply spectators. So, you needn’t consider yourself an afficionado of fancy footwork to be entranced by writer Coco Romack and photographer Yael Malka’s, A Sense of Shifting: Queer Artists Reshaping Dance ($27.50. Chronicle Books. yaelmalka.com / cocoromack.com). In each of the book’s dozen chapters, the authors braid visual and verbal essays to draw us into the emotional, intellectual and bodily processes of unique queer artists: The disability arts ensemble Kinetic Light, some of whose dancers use wheelchairs; Compania Manuel Linan, a Madrid-based group in which male dancers are able to employ motions and mannerisms exclusively used by women in traditional flamenco; the trans-male pole dancer Ken Dahl, who once feared that gen- der-affirming surgery would cut off his income, but instead found it led him to new heights of creativity. “Through the way they move and the communities they construct,” writes Romack in an introduction, “these dancers embody expansive and liberatory means of existing.”

“Choose a subject and develop it,” was the advice given to students by one of the instructors at Manhattan’s School of Visual Arts in 1978. The response of one fidgety kid from small town Pennsylvania, affectionately chronicled by biographer Brad Gooch in Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring ($40. HarperCollins. bradgooch.com),was to begin “drawing penises obsessively…from a fire hydrant penis, to a Paul Klee-like study of penises and triangles…to a series of self-portraits of his own penis, ‘actual size’ and ‘erect’.” When Haring’s cartoonish cocks began appearing painted on subway walls and stickered on telephone poles, they not only represented a public assertion of his own homosexuality, but offered a celebratory public perspective on gayness that was a far cry from the sense of shame and sleaze conveyed by network news and Time magazine. It was only 11 years later that Haring died of AIDS, at age 31, but the interim decade had seen him rise to the highest echelons of the art world, the inherent joy of his work even more infectious than the disease that took him and so many of his downtown compatriots. Gooch, whose past works include the definitive biography of poet Frank O’Hara and Smash Cut, a memoir of his own youthful exuberance in the New York’s 1980s queer art scene, was born just six years before Haring; the overlap of their lives adds vibrance and poignancy to this deeply researched (Gooch conducted over 200 interviews), well-paced and warm-hearted book. Gooch takes stock of the criticism that disdained Haring’s work as more commerce than art, but also highlights the street smart political activism that bubbled beneath not only Haring’s images, but the methods by which he marketed them.

If Keith Haring has come to represent a certain school of 1980s queer culture, Bret Easton Ellis is emblematic of another: Elitist rather than exuberant; perpetually closet-haunted. While the height of Ellis’ fame (and infamy), came with the investment banker/murderer satire American Psycho, which was set in Manhattan, his sleek, tweezed-eyebrow prose style has always been rooted in his native Los Angeles. Ellis’ first novel in a decade, The Shards (Vintage. $18. breteastonellis.com) is set in 1981 and takes him back to the tony homes, absent parents, and horny trust fund teenagers of his first book, Less Than Zero. But it is more engaging and more playful given the passage of time between its writing and the milieu that inspired it. In his debut, Ellis molded an autobiographical avatar of himself (cleverly named Clay) as the protagonist of what’s not so much a dynamic story as a documentary wallow in the overprivileged lucre of private school kids on their first college break (drugs, sex, MTV). In The Shards, he dispenses with his fictional moniker (the main character is called Bret Easton Ellis) while amping up his storytelling imagination. He weaves together memoir-infused adolescent chronicles with an ultra-creepy serial killer plot. Despite a title that suggests fragmentation, The Shards finds Easton bringing together the strongest elements of Zero and Psycho to create his most substantial work to date. Also worth noting: The Shards will give you the hards—Ellis writes masterful gay sex scenes.

What are your favorite luxury hotel amenities? Club level lounges? Private airport transfers? Concierge-assisted reservations at top restaurant tables? Well, you can consider yourself an amateur compared to the patrons of the titular hotel in Termush ($16. Farrar Straus Giroux. us.macmillan.com), a taut, chilling novella written by Danish author Sven Holm in 1967 but only recently published in English. This high-concept dystopian fantasy features a group of travelers who’ve had the foresight to make advance bookings at an exclusive resort, set to have its grand opening whenever apocalyptic disaster befalls Earth. Sure, there’s salon-quality hair conditioner in the suites, but there’s also the promise of protection from the aftereffects of calamity, attentive staff in Hazmat suits, creeping paranoia, and hordes of the less fortunate clamoring at the gates. Would you prefer acupressure or a deep tissue massage, sir?

 

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