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2021 was challenging, but on the books front, I had a good year. I wrote and published an erotic gay novel called The Lodger, That Summer, which connected with readers in ways I could never have imagined. A humbling experience which taught me a lot.

I’m super grateful to all the readers who have reviewed or rated The Lodger on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ, or recommended it to their friends. Discovering this positive and supportive online community, especially around queer books, has been one of the wonderful things in 2021.

I also stepped up and diversified my reading this year, meeting my (completely arbitrary) 75 book challenge. I read more that at any other time in my life. I discovered brilliant writers such as Lauren Groff and Bryan Washington. I read my first (but not last) collection of poetry (Glasshouses by Stuart Barnes). I started this Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ account and began writing about the books I was reading.

TOP QUEER READS OF THE YEAR
(but ask me another time and the list might differ wildly�)

1. Memorial - Bryan Washington
2. Doubting Thomas - Matthew Clark Davison
3. Detransition, Baby - Torrey Peters
4. Filthy Animals - Brendon Taylor
5. Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl - Andrea Lawlor
6. The Great Believers - Rebecca Makkai
7. Bitter Eden - Tatamkhulu Afrika
8. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous - Ocean Vuong
9. As Beautiful As Any Other: A memoir of my body - Kaya Wilson
10. The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone - Olivia Laing

Honourable mentions:

Lay Your Sleeping Head - Michael Nava
Cleanness - Garth Greenwell
Tin Man - Sarah Winman
Invisible Boys - Holden Sheppard
Corfu - Robert Dessaix
The Boy from the Mish - Gary Lonesborough
100 Boyfriends - Brontez Purnell
After Francesco - Brian Malloy
Skin - Kerry Andrew
Bath Haus - P.J. Vernon

Happy new year and happy reading everyone! Thanks for your recommendations, keep ‘em coming!

“It’s fascinating that explicit tales of men seducing other men should now sit on millions of bedside tables in the suburban bedrooms of heterosexual households the world over. On some level, it’s wonderful that stories of coming out, sexuality, and homophobia have been so openly welcomed into the mainstream, revealing thousands of allies in the process. Who am I to decide or judge who should write or read queer stories?�

I wrote a piece for Publishers Weekly’s BookLife supplement about the tyranny of genre, why I chose to self-publish and who gets to tell queer stories.

If you’re curious you can read the full piece here:

Hi friends,

The Lodger, That Summer is still available for free on Kindle Unlimited (for a limited time) or at a very affordable price in the Kindle store. If you like holding a real book in your hands, I'm happy to say you can now order it on paperback too!






Links:
Amazon , , , etc.



...and my website,

You can also find me in the new book lovers app Readerly (hit me up for an access code).

Thanks for supporting indie authors!

Happy reading,
- Levi

This is the music I was listening to last summer as I wrote the novel, a musical mood board I used as inspiration, in some cases writing scenes to specific tracks (if you’ve read it, I’ll let you guess which).

I was going for a gay teenager’s soundtrack to a sweltering Sydney Summer; tunes dropped in a club or heard at the gym, on the bluetooth speaker by the pool or in headphones staring out the car window.

It leans heavily towards electro-pop and that optimistic Aussie dance sound that conjures youthful escapades and a summer of possibilities. Enjoy!



PS: Paperback edition of The Lodger, That Summer is out next week!

Did YA exist when I was a teenager? Probably not as the genre it is today. The books that broke through my teen angst and spoke to me of other ways to be were by Donna Tartt, Douglas Coupland, Michael Chabon: adult novels I could decipher and from which I could imagine new pathways beyond the options presented by my peers. And then there were the gay writers whose work felt illicit or impenetrable and, writing with other adults in mind, did little to assuage my adolescent fears.

Today there’s an entire corner of literature for and about teens, and it’s as diverse and ambitious and ground-breaking as anything in the literary fiction aisle. I wish I was 16 again so I could immerse myself in this universe. More to the point, I wish my 16 year-old self could have found some of these unwritten books then. I can’t count the ways in which my life might have been different.

In The Boy From The Mish, Yuin author Gary Lonesboroough tells the uplifting story of a seventeen year-old Indigenous boy making sense of his desires, his beliefs and his future during one hot Australian summer.

It's almost Christmas, school's out, and Jackson’s looking forward to hanging with his mates. Just like every year, Jackson's Aunty and little cousins visit from the city - but this time they’re joined by another teen with whom Jackson has to share a room. Tomas is just out of Juvie, snores and would be annoying if he wasn’t so damn� cute.

What follows is the marvelous story of a queer awakening told in the simple but limpid voice of a mischievous boy who for the first time in his life, needs to make some serious choices.

An Aboriginal perspective on the coming out story is exactly what the world needs right now. Speaking from lived experience, the author tells a familiar tale but illuminates it with new insights. Well, new to this white reader anyway.

Lonesborough deftly captures the inner-monologue of a misfit youth wrestling with that particular brand of anxiety, the tug of war between fear and excitement, vulnerability in the face of self-doubt and the sense of invincibility common to young men of that age. Without positive models of gay life to refer to, Jackson wants to “get back to the way things were before I met him. Get back to me, to who I was, who I can still be.�

The stakes are high. Being different on The Mish is already perilous: Jackson and his friends have to contend with racism, both systemic and in their daily encounters with white kids and tourists. Rejection from his own community would break up the only real support system available to Jackson. The author makes subtle but very real references to the dead ends Aboriginal men too often face growing up in systemically racist system: juvie, jail, substance abuse, suicide.

Throw queerness in the mix and the environment becomes volatile indeed. “This is the Mish. No one does that here. I don’t do that.�

At the same time, Jackson discovers that connection to the land and to his community is also where he can locate the strength to be who he wants to be. In this respect, it’s particularly refreshing to see the rites of adolescent passage play out against a natural backdrop. Key moments in Jackson’s journey of self-discovery take place canoeing on a river, hiking up a mountain or during a smoking ceremony.

In an incredible conversation with an Elder, Jackson is told of the enduring suffocating shame of colonization, and its antidote: a pride in who we are, who we love and where we come from. Drawing that line between cultural revitalization and self-determination in the context of coming out is incredibly powerful. It’s a fleeting but defining moment in a book that rarely preaches, dispensing its lessons with a light touch.

When Tomas and Jackson discuss their collaborative graphic novel, an Aboriginal superhero origin story, it’s clear to the reader who the real superheroes are, and what they have to teach us. This book should be on the high school curriculum across the land.

I hoped this book would be useful and it was, covering as it does all of the bases, including - thank you! - self-publishing. Surprisingly, it was more than that too.

While it focuses on the business of being an author, this concise volume also delivers valuable insights into how one might survive and thrive as an writer. What's refreshing here is that the focus is not on making money. Georgia Richter and Deborah Hunn clearly understand that writers need a business manual only as a means to an end: the goal is sustainability because, well, we don't have a choice but to write.

So while you'll find all you need to know about representation and publishing and self-promotion, you'll also learn about self-care and support systems and how you can be an ethical and generous participant in the cultural ecosystem.

The internet is littered with books to buy if you want to learn about selling books. This one is special because it doesn't require you to put all your trust into a self-proclaimed expert. Instead, it shares thoughtful, candid and useful advice from a diverse bunch of successful (often West-) Australian writers such as Amanda Curtin, Daniel de Lorne and David Whish-Wilson. Their contributions are carefully considered and practical.

It would have been great to see a few case studies unpacking the business models of publishing (and self-publishing), including a breakdown of figures, though I imagine there are sensitivities and confidentiality issues.

The list of resources is comprehensive, the research is thorough and the tone is encouraging. Fellow writers, don't miss out.

John Glynn’s memoir charts a summer spent in the Long Island resort town of Montauk in his late twenties, living in a share house with a rotating menagerie of finance bros, gay party animals and young women who could be models (but are studying for the CPA). By and large they are white, privileged twentysomethings, who all live in Manhattan.

John thinks of himself as straight but soon develops a crush on another guy spending his weekends in The Hive, as they call their frat-house-on-the-sea. John and his newfound preppy friends spend their days binge-drinking (sometimes starting at breakfast, often passing out from the effort), playing beer pong and hanging out at the bar or the beach or the beach bar. They wear brand apparel (there are more brands listed than in American Psycho) and listen to mainstream dance music (which doesn’t age well: one anthem meant to crystalize the joyful abandon of their hedonistic experience is now a KFC jingle).

John is sad because he’s lonely and because his grandma died. Both, of course, are good reasons to be sad, but there is no ‘fatal flaw� here that might hint at tragedy, just low-wattage Millennial angst burning bright against a dim backdrop of superficial pursuits. But then the author admits that to him and his house mates, “minor vexations and true hardships were one and the same.�

Are you still reading? Perhaps you belong to the 1% and are keen to see your life finally reflected in print? Or perhaps you don’t and you think, as I did, that this is a great set up for blistering social commentary on the contemporary mores of a crumbling late-capitalist empire, or at the very least, for a slasher-horror bloodbath.

If you’re feeling generous, you’ll stay, as I did, because coming out is never easy (even when you’re a good-looking cis-gendered white Manhattanite with a supportive family), and these transitions from self-doubt to self-knowledge should be documented and shared. After all, I believe coming out is a life-long process and there’s much to learn, still, always, from the experience of others.

Chances are you’ll be disappointed. If John and his buddies were 17, his slight journey of self-discovery might have seemed more consequential and compelling. But he’s ten years older than that and shares a house with a gaggle of gays who are out and proud: it seems the only reason it takes him so long to discover his own sexual identity is that he’s just too hung over to think, dammit.

While the author does briefly acknowledge his privilege, he does not use that self-awareness to portray the non-events of that summer through a critical lens. Instead, entire passages read like Airbnb advertorials, TripAdvisor reviews and someone describing Tommy Hilfiger magazine ads with drunken earnestness.

(If I’m being harsh, it’s probably because as a privileged white writer, I wrestle with this stuff myself. “Write what you know� is the advice that new authors are most often given, with good reason. That’s probably why it took me decades to even think about writing. That ambivalence is still hard to shake.)

To be fair, Out East has its share of insightful observations. Montauk is vividly rendered, and even without the bite of satire, Glynn does deftly capture a certain American milieu and moment in our recent past. It’s well written and some moments are genuinely touching or inventive.

I particularly loved the verbatim reproduction of the share house contract, which in carefully worded clauses reveals the excess and dramas that might have occurred in previous summers, cleverly setting up the scene for the season to come.

The more we know the deeper we write, and we all must start somewhere after all � it may as well be from a place of authenticity and lived experience. As a memoir, this never feels less than truthful. While I found it hard to connect with this particular material, there’s obviously considerable talent at work here and I’m actually quite curious to read what John Glynn writes next.

Richard is lonely and who can blame him. Around him, other gay New Yorkers seem to effortlessly glide through an instagram-ready world of expensive restaurants, Fire Island beaches, gym-toned bodies and orgiastic sex.

He’s stuck in a rut, suffers from academic paralysis, hates his roommate, and app-enabled hook-ups are showing diminishing returns. It’s a brand of millennial angst so common as to render his low-grade depression invisible, even to himself. Richard has a lot going for him, just not self-awareness.

So when our protagonist meets not one but two individuals with the potential to rescue him from himself, we can’t help but root for him, at least at first. Blake is a lawyer who looks like he could be a good match for Richard, not least because he actually likes him. Anne is also a lonely academic, who agrees to write his papers in exchange for a companionship that eventually turns into something more intimate.

After years of solitude, it’s hard to resent Richard for pursuing both options simultaneously, stringing along two people who probably deserve better. It’s not easy being broke in Brooklyn. After years of going dutch, he’d finally found someone to pay the metaphorical cheque.

In the end, Richard’s self-delusion, narcissism and indecisiveness are no match for Blake and Anne’s goodwill. In a masterful crescendo of anxiety, the situation comes to a head and the reader has no choice but to turn on our sympathetic hero.

The harder it was to like Richard, the more I felt compelled to understand why. I quickly realised two things that convinced me to stick around.

Firstly, Richard is a product of his late-capitalism surface-obsessed environment, in a city where every relationship seems transactional. James Gregor’s novel is filled with sharp observational insights into a society that discourages any kind of healthy inner-life.

Secondly, Richard holds up a mirror to the reader, and I could see some of my own flaws reflected there (and I’m not talking about attractive flaws either). Unmoored, Richard moves through life without logic or planning. He’s unable to recognize that this is true of most people, whatever their curated social media profiles might advertise.

New York City has grown up, left its adolescent excesses behind as it gentrified into middle-of-the-road consumerist adulthood (a land of “solar-powered taco stands� and “metallurgically bitter coffee�). Richard is unable to do the same, late to grasp that coming out is only half the battle (especially in a world where being gay fails to raise an eyebrow), taking responsibility for oneself is much, much harder.

Going Dutch is a skillful portrait of a life in stasis, of a man in a permanent state of deferral. Many will be put off by the unlikable Richard. It’s a shame because Gregor James has created a complex and revealing character whose meandering journey holds the key to understanding a much wider malaise. That the ride is uncomfortable is precisely the point.

Beneath the surface of this expertly written and highly arousing piece of straight-to-gay erotica is a searing portrait of contemporary masculinity and internalised self-loathing. It’s a subversive sleigh-of-hand that only a very talented writer could pull-off.

Joe Heath is a 40-something British everyman heading straight for the predictable crisis of the white suburban male. Having sleepwalked into adulthood, he’s now fallen out of love with his wife. His job brings him no personal satisfaction, his friends seem to have drifted away unnoticed and his kids may was well live on another planet.

A male physio’s massage at the gym triggers a surprising hard-on, the first step in a journey of sexual self-discovery as Joe uses gay sex to unlock his cell and fuck his way to freedom.

Unfortunately, freedom doesn’t taste as sweet as he’d briefly allowed himself to imagine. Instead, Joe finds himself in larger, invisible cage, built by his own hands and made entirely of self-hatred.

What starts as generic but highly effective erotica quickly morphs into something much less comfortable: a self-narrated portrait of existential despair.

James Lear takes a significant risk in painting Joe Heath as a self-delusional, self-pitying, self-absorbed and self-indulgent twat � I suspect some readers won’t stay along for the ride. Joe’s an inconsiderate husband and negligent father. He’s sexist, narcissistic and boring, an empty vessel with no inner life. Sex at first is liberation, until Joe imbues it with the soullessness that permeates the rest of his life. In some ways he’s Patrick Bateman’s under-achieving Brit cousin.

The risk pays off. We may not like our narrator, but by the time we recognise his flaws we’ve been tricked into identifying with him through beautifully described first person sexual fantasies.

Joe Heath is a blank canvas onto which brave readers will project their worst insecurities. He’s a mirror in which we see reflected our most self-delusional hedonistic narratives, self-gratifying impulses disguised as non-conformism, selfish streaks paraded as self-affirmation in the face of social oppression.

Clever is the novelist who can design a story that works so effectively on multiple levels at once. In a surprising, well-executed ending, we are shown how dishonesty and self-loathing reproduce themselves socially like a virus, and the courage it might take to break the cycle.

In the same way the best violent novels interrogate our relationship to violence, and even our complicity as readers, While My Wife’s Away invites us to reflect on the sex we aspire to have and what it says about the people we aspire to be. I was turned on, yet also encouraged to ponder what turned me on and why, and the part that honesty and self-delusion play in the process.

It’s not what I was expecting when I picked up this book with my left hand, but now that my right hand is stroking my chin, I can’t say I’m ungrateful for the change of plan.

As a reader, the rush of excitement when you stumble across a voice that’s specific and authentic � one that stands out from the crowd yet speaks to you personally - is hard to beat.

I’m not generally a reader of mysteries, which is my loss since it’s kept me away from Michael Nava all these years. That was a mistake. Reading Lay Your Sleeping Head, a reworking of his 1986 Henry Rios mystery The Little Death, it quickly became obvious Nava is one of those quietly original and influential queer writers that should be household names � and not just to readers of mysteries and procedurals.

The strength of this dark slice of Californian noir isn’t the mystery that needs solving, however tightly plotted. Uncovering the truth behind the death of troubled golden boy Hugh and the corruption at the highest levels of Linden University (Stanford?) certainly kept me turning the page, but what kept me riveted was the character of Henry Rios himself, a gay, Latino public defender in the Bay Area.

You need a strong protagonist if you’re going to build a series of seven novels on the man’s broad shoulders. Nava borrows the well-worn tropes of the hardboiled genre � Henry’s dinner is two bowls of cereal washed down with a shot of Jack Daniel’s � only to subvert them by giving his guy a singular perspective informed by ethnicity, class, and sexuality.

Nava gets Henry’s mix of anti-hero resignation, hard-earned wisdom and persistent idealism just right. His marginalisation is born not just of a sexuality that doesn’t conform to its milieu (law enforcement, the 1980s), but how it intersects with a poor upbringing and the migrant experience. Henry doesn’t feel like he belongs anywhere, and that includes San Francisco’s flourishing gay community. Many will relate.

Henry is locked in a constant struggle to get at the truth and expose the lies of others, while wrestling with his own self-delusions and deceptions. Placing a truth-seeker in an environment where one must lie to survive is very smart indeed.

Without sentiment or psychological over-explaining, we discover how a man is driven to pick a side in the fight between justice and power. This struggle motivates his actions, but also animates Henry’s interior conflict. He’s forever “swimming up from deep water, [his] lungs about to burst, trying to reach the surface and breathe.� From the first page we believe (in) this character: his quest becomes ours. When rays of light pierce through the clouds of misanthropy, manipulation and murder � in the form of a fleeting chance at human connection � we root for Harry to curl up in the sunlight and rest his weary head.

In one scene, Henry tours a man’s study. "On a bookshelf was the same small collection of gay novels that every gay man owned: City of Night, The City and the Pillar, A Single Man, Dancer from the Dance, Tales of the City." Michael Nava’s name belongs in the canon and Lay Your Sleeping Head wouldn’t look out of place on that shelf.

Come for the mystery, stay for the social commentary, and fall in love with a great character, safe in the knowledge there are more books where he came from.