Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith

Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fragments and some unrelated scenes tolds in the first person by two sisters.

Ali Smith surprises from the beginning, she is able of "writing" the story inside our heads, more than in the paper lines, she has a soft, natural, queer approach, evoking almost automatically Virginia Woolf's "Orlando". For example, it is evening, grandfather sits his two granddaughters in the lap, grandmother nearby, and starts telling them stories of his youth, when he was a girl; or when Anthea falls in love with Robin, while she is climbing down a ladder after painting a bold protest phrase in the façade of corporate headquarters:“He was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life. But he really looked like a girl. She was the most beautiful boy I’d ever seen in my life.”
And it's not just about the loves of the two sisters, it is also about the ambiance of Scotland, the strangeness of London and Englishness, work ethics and political protest, and more... all painted in our minds with a few beautiful strokes.

My first book of Ali Smith, yes, first, because it will not be the last, for sure!


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NEW: The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart: A Novel by Larry Kramer

The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart: A Novel by Larry Kramer

NEW: published April, 2015
TO READ
Larry Kramer, the well known LGBT rights activist, one of the protagonists of the early days of fight against AIDS, an author famous for his provocative novel, Faggots, and his awarded play, The Normal Heart, will be publishing this month the first volume of his ambitious The American People: A History, a "proustian" work of historic fictions about America and the Americans, a people, according to the author, contaminated by hate and greed, but capable of noble acts of great courage and kindness.

NEW: The Prince of los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood by Richard Blanco

The Prince of los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood by Richard Blanco
NEW: published September, 2014
TO READ
A poignant, hilarious, and inspiring memoir from the first Latino and openly gay inaugural poet, which explores his coming-of-age as the child of Cuban immigrants and his attempts to understand his place in America while grappling with his burgeoning artistic and sexual identities.
Richard Blanco’s childhood and adolescence were experienced between two imaginary worlds: his parents’ nostalgic world of 1950s Cuba and his imagined America, the country he saw on reruns of The Brady Bunch and Leave it to Beaver—an “exotic” life he yearned for as much as he yearned to see “la patria.”
Navigating these worlds eventually led Blanco to question his cultural identity through words; in turn, his vision as a writer—as an artist—prompted the courage to accept himself as a gay man. In this moving, contemplative memoir, the 2013 inaugural poet traces his poignant, often hilarious, and quintessentially American coming-of-age and the people who influenced him.
A prismatic and lyrical narrative rich with the colors, sounds, smells, and textures of Miami, Richard Blanco’s personal narrative is a resonant account of how he discovered his authentic self and ultimately, a deeper understanding of what it means to be American. His is a singular yet universal story that beautifully illuminates the experience of “becoming;” how we are shaped by experiences, memories, and our complex stories: the humor, love, yearning, and tenderness that define a life.

NEW: Nights at Rizzoli by Felice Picano

Nights at Rizzoli by Felice Picano
Published in January, 2015
TO READ

Salvador Dalí, Jerome Robbins, Jackie Onassis. Gregory Peck, Mick Jagger—S. J. Perelman—I. M. Pei. Philip Johnson, Josephine Baker, John Lennon: they, and so many more who made New York City the center of the universe in the 1970s, all had one thing in common besides their adopted hometown—they shopped at a legendary palace of books, music and art: Rizzoli Books at 712 Fifth Avenue. There, Kennedys and Rockefellers mingled with tourists and “regular” customers under the watchful gaze of sophisticated employees, themselves a multi-talented, international collection of artists, scholars and rogues.
Nights at Rizzoli is the memoir of Felice Picano, an aspiring but near-starving young writer who in 1971 lucked into a part-time job at the stunningly elegant store via a friend. It metamorphosed into a life-changing experience, one that exposed him to some of the brightest lights in the world’s cultural capital. At the store, he himself became a key player on a stage that opened every night to a new drama that often featured romance, at times violence, and of course always the books and their readers. And when his shift was over, in this post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS era, the handsome young bookstore manager stepped from one world into another, prowling the piers, bars and very private clubs of a different New York City.

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The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

For Ursula K. le Guin, science fiction is just the hypothetical scenario where she takes us to be able to question social some conventions and prejudices of mankind. No interstellar explosions, fantastic spaceships, green Martians with antennas, androids and other Hollywood special effects... just immensely fascinating!


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20th Century Un-limited by Felice Picano
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was disappointed with the first story (my rating: 2 of 5 stars)! The initial pages are gleaming (that's why I bought the book...), but thereafter the writing style is descriptive, unimaginative and the plot uninteresting. Where is "my" Felice Picano of "Like People in History"?
Fortunately, the second story, Ingoldsby, is much better (my rating: 4 of 5 stars)! It is also a sci-fi/fantasy tale that mixes past with present, but this time with much more subtlety. Even the narrative structure (a series of police reports, newspaper articles and journals) is smarter, bringing the reader to the author/narrator level, in trying to understand what happened from scraps, bits and pieces, just like what may happen in a real police investigation.

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