David K. Johnson’s "Buying Gay" is a compelling retrospective of physique magazines, which provided gay men with an outlet in the 1950s and 1960s. The “Physique Era”... Read More

Jacques Schiffrin was an influential publisher in Paris at the outbreak of World War II, but soon he had to flee the life he’d built and begin again in the United States. The... Read More

The destructive earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster that struck Japan in March of 2011 may be growing more distant in the public consciousness, but in Kimura Yūsuke’s... Read More

Every day, thousands of “leading experts” tell us what to embrace and what to avoid. But how useful is the advice? How do useless trends and products make their way into the... Read More

In "Sentimental Tales", Mikhail Zoshchenko masterfully exhibits a playful seriousness. Hilarity flits over a biting satirical indictment of the 1920s Soviet literary scene. As... Read More

In gorgeous prose, the novel blends together seemingly disparate narratives to form a harmonious whole. In "Sisters of the Cross", Alexei Remizov captures the strata of human... Read More

Quietly masterful, the novel contains rich details of nineteenth-century Russian life. Sofia Khvoshchinskaya’s "City Folk and Country Folk" is a slyly captivating,... Read More

What the handbook proves unequivocally and strikingly is that the LGBT community is not going away, and businesses must take notice or be left behind. The "Handbook of LGBT... Read More

The book shows that the popularity of the cuisine is due, in part, to the fact that it was never strictly Chinese. Anne Mendelson’s Chow Chop Suey: Food and the Chinese... Read More

Indescribable—except to mention the author’s position as professor of religion at Columbia, and that it contains some of the finest prose and photography you’ll find... Read More

The author, a novelist, wrote these sparkling, discursive essays during Japan’s brutal World War II occupation of Shanghai. Readers are likely to consider her a carefree... Read More

Few memoirs have the concision, modesty, and charm that mark this late-life work by Donald Keene, America’s most renowned scholar and interpreter of Japan. As a Columbia... Read More