★★★★★
275 pages • Anthony Blond • 1961 [PB]

A gay love story about young working-class men, for a change (or at least it was back in the ’60s.)

The Leather Boys is a 1961 London pulp novel by Gillian Freeman, and later made into a New Wave Brit flick in 1963 by the aptly named Sidney Furie. It is about two late-teen, working-class, south London ton-up biker boys who find themselves surprised, unnerved & ultimately confused to discover they’re in love with each other.

★★★★★
275 pages • Steerforth • 1938, 1998 [PB]

The Happy Island is a story of rich New York in the late 1930s, and work of genius from a master satirist.

It is the nightclub singer Prudence Bly who is Powell’s greatest performance. She should hold a high place in the literary hall of fame aside Ignatius J. Reilly and Bertie Wooster. The exchanges with her coeval and rival Jean Nelson are electric.

★★★★★
212 pages • Ward, Lock, and Company • 1891

This classic book starts out well enough but Wilde looses control of the plot as it meanders toward its conclusion.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is an acknowledged classic in the canon of English literature. Reading it through one has to wonder why. It is not so much the book itself but the associations with the book’s author, his history.

★★★★★
198 pages • Olympia Press • 1959

Weird and twisted, Naked Lunch is nevertheless a unique moment in American literature.

Naked Lunch is … well, it is hard to call it a novel, but that is only because the classification of the novel is one of those agreed upon definitions that the creators of the Syllabus go in for. Burroughs nevertheless called it a novel in his letters. That said, he was also off his head on junk when writing both the letters and the book itself.

★★★★★
198 pages • Penguin • 1971

This pre-WW1 novel, finished in 1914 yet not published until 1971, is a great work about the struggle of Maurice Hall to come to terms with his sexuality.

In 1911 Forster wrote in his diary of his “weariness of the only subject that I both can and may treat – the love of men for women and vice versa”. In Maurice Forster tackled the subject of homosexuality and assessed what it meant. Maurice is as pioneering a book now as it was then.

★★★★★
198 pages • Penguin • 1971

This pre-WW1 novel, finished in 1914 yet not published until 1971, is a great work about the struggle of Maurice Hall to come to terms with his sexuality.

In 1911 Forster wrote in his diary of his “weariness of the only subject that I both can and may treat – the love of men for women and vice versa”. In Maurice Forster tackled the subject of homosexuality and assessed what it meant. Maurice is as pioneering a book now as it was then.

★★★★★
324 pages • McClelland and Stewart • 1985

Atwood’s great dystopian novel about a futuristic fundamentalist society is spellbinding and bewildering.

The Handmaid’s Tale is a virtuoso performance, and Atwood’s great definitive statement on the dangers inherent in the postmodern era.

★★★★★
188 pages • Minerva • 1985

Fast-paced, funny, and astute, Boating for Beginners is unlike anything else Winterson has written.

Boating for Beginners is, in a way, mythology for beginners. It is the process by which the everyday is transformed into the eternal that is its subject. The fact that Noah accidentally creates God out of a toaster and a Black Forest Gateau is Winterson’s comedic take on this very process.

★★★★★
208 pages • Reilly & Britton • 1904

The remarkably subversive sequel to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz established the world of Oz, and does not feature Judy … I mean, Dorothy.

★★★★★
224 pages • Little, Brown • 1968

Wildly funny and deepy serious, Myra Breckinridge is a classic that marked a turning point in American history and literature.

The issues that Vidal explores – how identity and sexuality are shaped by the cinema and television, and how machismo is played out in irrational wars on foreign nations – are as relevant now as they were in 1968. It is a classic of the Cold War era in American literature.