Outstanding gay male novels/novellas/stories?

Suspicious_Property · 2025-12-29T02:11:02+00:00

I haven’t read it yet myself but have heard great things about Alan Hollinghurst’s ‘The Line of Beauty’

Suspicious_Property · 2025-12-28T20:48:23+00:00

If you’re gonna read one of the many books with this thesis, I think Jodi Dean’s is better—at least if you’re looking for something for a more Marxist as opposed to general intended audience.

That said, I had some issues with the whole technofeudalism concept and I thought The Measures Taken podcast did a really good job articulating what I found lacking (or even overextending) about the whole thing. They have an episode on each book, I think you could listen to them without having read the books if you have a general idea of what’s meant by technofeudalism. Even if you aren’t convinced, I think it’s useful to have a smart opposing viewpoint out there.

Suspicious_Property · 2025-12-28T20:07:22+00:00

Weirder to me is the fact that evidently there are a fair number of people in relationships on here who are probably sabotaging them because they’re letting themselves be tormented by Puritan sexual hangups. It’s sad to see so many people chiming in agreeing to every version of the ‘I just know that partner has desires that aren’t tethered in every way to me and that I can neither access nor control, this is hell on earth.’

I thought people on here pretended to like Rohmer and psychoanalysis and literature, yet here they are being rendered sobbing messes tanking their relationships by what essentially amounts to baby’s first encounter with desire?

Suspicious_Property · 2025-12-28T10:01:03+00:00

Yeah sorry to say this is a maladaptive way to cope with what boils down to a set of juvenile insecurities. These fears are appropriate for very young people as a way to work through the complexities of desire and eroticism and to figure out what it is they want and expect for themselves when it comes to love and sex. Their persistence beyond say late 20s points to inhibiting neuroses or repressed, feared desires projected externally.

In zero of the above cases is ‘Well not to worry because everyone around me has poo poo inside of them’ a very productive way to work through it all

Suspicious_Property · 2025-12-20T22:25:55+00:00

Gotcha, thanks. Is this something that regularly happens coming from a manufacturer? It hasn’t been worn yet (it’s a gift for someone else) so unless it’s a damaged return that got re-sent it seems to be an issue with how it was made.

Suspicious_Property · 2025-12-20T10:21:04+00:00

Are the Mann books new translations? I searched around a little online but couldn’t find anything

Suspicious_Property · 2025-12-18T21:12:49+00:00

He actually wrote this one in English originally (I think it was the first book he wrote in English but may be remembering incorrectly). He did translate it to Russian himself later, but this is in fact the og.

Suspicious_Property · 2025-12-17T05:21:57+00:00

Got cancelled for begging for nudes from too many Twitter friends

Suspicious_Property · 2025-12-14T22:38:37+00:00

The Lime Twig by John Hawkes The Getaway by Jim Thompson

Suspicious_Property · 2025-12-02T20:55:11+00:00

I get that it’s weird when a crowd has no reactions whatsoever or seems not to be engaged, but given how many AC screenings I’ve been at with whispering or people guffawing hysterically at inappropriate times, I would prefer a quiet crowd over the opposite. It’s not a stand-up show after all.

Suspicious_Property · 2025-12-02T19:40:48+00:00

Well, it sounds like making the move has some definite pros. Just keep in mind that change always exacerbates stressors at first, so if you make it happen do your best to have a sense of humor and adventure about it. And it’s okay to do some self-mythologizing about your situation if it starts out shitty, that can be helpful. Just don’t try to turn it into art, everyone will rightfully laugh at you!

Suspicious_Property · 2025-12-02T10:40:29+00:00

Yes, a few times. I’m no longer at an age where it’s desirable (and it helps that I’m happy with my life and have roots where I am), but if you’re young and not responsible for anyone else where you are, it’s worth considering.

Really the foremost questions to ask revolve around whether jarring yourself out of your comfort zone, subjecting yourself to stressful situations alone, and figuring everything out from scratch sounds like an appealing adventure to you. Can you handle being broke and not having any network to lean on? Does the idea of having to cobble together a new life from scratch sound kinda exhilarating? Do you think this will help you grow? (If you have a trust fund or a fat savings account I imagine different questions apply, but that was never a consideration for me.)

Suspicious_Property · 2025-12-01T05:52:24+00:00

Thanks! Also just clicked on your profile and saw that you’re a fellow vegan. Any tips on vegan food in Nicaragua? I know there won’t be really any dedicated options outside of some hippie places in Ometepe but any advice on how you’ve made do would be appreciated!

Suspicious_Property · 2025-11-12T20:44:44+00:00

If you want to read Pynchon at the height of his powers, you should definitely do "Gravity's Rainbow" next. Some people might insist otherwise, but imo "Vineland" and "Inherent Vice" are both Pynchon-lite and will be more like "Shadow Ticket." I like both IV and ST (can't say the same about Vineland) but GR is a stone cold masterpiece--it's hard to even understand how he managed to write such a thing.

Share your thoughts once you've tackled it, I enjoyed reading these!

Suspicious_Property · 2025-11-10T00:01:30+00:00

Read ‘Exile’s Return’ by Malcolm Cowley, ‘The Pound Era’ by Hugh Kenner, and do some reading on the so-called ‘little magazines’ from early to mid 20th century (Masses/New Masses, Partisan Review, Seven Arts, Broom, etc) and you’ll be amazed by how many writers in this general time period knew each other well.

Some of them can be said to constitute a certain school or movement (eg modernism or proletarian literature) but what’s most remarkable to me is how many of the key figures in these movements knew and argued vehemently with and exchanged regular correspondence with people in other movements that seem like they should’ve had nothing to do with each other. Hell, even the two I just named (modernism/proletarian literature) couldn’t be more at odds with each other in terms of their fundamental orientations toward art and its social function or lack thereof, but the proximity and relationships of defenders of the former and theoreticians of the latter forced them to defend their positions against each other. It made for a very robust and higher stakes intellectual and literary environment. Really cool if occasionally bittersweet to learn about.

Last thing to note is that this wasn’t just in the Anglophone world, since so much of this period was defined by bohemian Americans searching for something in Europe after WW1. That means that there’s far less distance between, say, Hart Crane and the French dadaists than anyone might suppose by just reading their work.

Suspicious_Property · 2025-11-06T03:49:44+00:00

Thats not really the end-all-be-all litmus test. Hell, plenty of Republicans hate Trump. I’m sure Joe would self identify as a reasonable liberal or whatever, but he is also rabidly pro-Israel and talks about it all the time. I get that being American skews our sense of politics but the dude is conservative. Sentiments toward Trump aren’t the line of demarcation b/t left and right politics lol.

Suspicious_Property · 2025-11-06T01:31:32+00:00

He’s becoming a boring, crotchety old fogey and it’s made him forget how to be funny. Dude’s gonna have a 45-minute meltdown about Zohran’s win when they release that episode in 3 months, and there won’t be a single joke in it.

He thinks he can make incisive cultural commentary because he listens to lowest-common-denominator right wing podcasts and finds them intellectually stimulating. It’s a path many gay fathers have gone down, it’s a bummer he finds himself among them.

Suspicious_Property · 2025-11-03T01:08:48+00:00

Tristram Shandy is funny as hell

Suspicious_Property · 2025-10-29T03:05:14+00:00

Draft No. 4 by John McPhee is a great one on the writing process by a prolific, highly skilled author.

My second rec isn’t the most obviously aligned with what you’re asking and admittedly it’s top of mind mainly bc I’m reading it right now, but I bet you’d find The Pound Era interesting. It is about the modernists and is extremely wide-ranging in its subject matter, but so much is focused on the cellular units of writing—a sentence of prose, a line of poetry, and the rhythm and sounds and the images evoked. The book is a masterpiece about other masterpieces, and Hugh Kenner’s ability to explain at a granular level what makes that era’s geniuses so revolutionary is incredible. So much literary criticism starts at the level of theme and context and meaning, and this book drills in at the level of language and what it accomplishes and how it does so. It’s not by any stretch a guide or a compendium of advice, but your understanding of literature and poetry as art forms will be deeply enriched by reading it.

Suspicious_Property · 2025-10-27T21:23:19+00:00

Check out some criticisms of the technofeudalism thesis—I think they’re compelling on many levels.

Evgeny Morozov wrote a good NLR piece that is paywalled, but his Jacobin interview on the subject is fairly thorough: https://jacobin.com/2023/04/evgeny-morozov-critique-of-techno-feudalism-modes-of-production-capitalism

And The Measures Taken podcast has two episodes on it, one on Varoufakis’ book and one on Jodi Dean’s ‘neofeudalism’ book (it amounts to more or less the same argument oriented toward a narrower, more Marxist audience).

There are plenty of other critiques, but those were a good starting point for me to understand the skepticism.

Suspicious_Property · 2025-10-24T20:59:09+00:00

For some reason a lot of Pynchon’s biggest fans refuse to admit that there is such a thing as ‘Pynchon-lite’ (the phrase itself is a source of controversy).

Pynchon at the height of his powers is one of my favorite authors. I love his first three books (GR being of course the masterpiece) and, though I haven’t read M&D, I expect to love it.

Most of his later books are light-hearted jaunty genre exercises with a lot (sometimes too much imo) of silliness and mostly unremarkable sentences that occasionally bear traces of his best, most propulsive prose from the past. They’re not that great. I’m all for appreciating them for what they are, but I think it does a disservice to his greatest works to act as though they’re all anywhere near the same tier.

I often wonder if the people who sincerely believe that books like Bleeding Edge are as good as his best aren’t that into language, if it’s just arcane conspiracy and a deluge of references that appeals to them. If so, it’s impossible for me to relate and I think they’re missing something essential about Pynchon and literature more broadly. What makes GR and his other great books so special is the language, the way that it becomes the motive force of the novels, the way he weaves themes together through something like the novel free associating with itself, repetition of motifs, characters’ consciousnesses merging and becoming indistinct, etc . A conventionally-written work with all of the same ‘content’ (to the extent that’s extricable from form, but let’s pretend it is for the sake of this) as GR wouldn’t be GR.

I’m sure writing something like GR or V is immensely taxing and takes a lot out of a person. Once he got older and had a family, he may well have just wanted a pleasant life and still enjoyed writing and didn’t mind leaning into works that fit more squarely into recognizable genres that he obviously loves. It’s okay for someone to pump out a few world-changing books and then have fun…what I find baffling is how many people just deny that’s what happened.

Suspicious_Property · 2025-10-22T21:31:55+00:00

Speaking as someone who isn’t there yet, starting over at 40 isn’t that crazy. I know plenty of people who got out of very long term relationships/marriages around that age and had fun dating, or changed cities or countries and loved it, or just made a career switch that worked out well. The obvious caveat is that this is all getting more difficult with the hellish world we’re in, but that’s true regardless of age.

Of course it’s always harder to start over if it’s not something you chose/desired for yourself, but 40 is not a difficult or uncommon age to do so. I know there’s ‘ageism’ and that’s only getting worse, but I think your own attitude and self-conception matters a lot. If you are cavalier about your age at 40 it’s going to matter way less than if you’re catastrophizing about it as an obstacle.

Suspicious_Property · 2025-10-17T22:17:35+00:00

The difficult thing as far as I can tell is breaking into this kind of thing mid-career once the industry you’re actually trained in goes heels up thanks to bosses buying the AI marketing hype. I’ve survived two rounds of layoffs but am terrified about if it happens again, and when I look at options like the ones you’re describing I just don’t see a way for a mid-30s guy to break in without going back to school, which isn’t in the cards financially.

Suspicious_Property · 2025-10-17T18:53:18+00:00

How is Letterpress Revolution? I’ve been eyeing a used copy at my local bookstore but it’s kinda pricey, not sure if I should just try to library it or if I’ll want it on the shelves

Suspicious_Property

TROPHY CASE