In the center lies the narrator’s relationship with R., which flourishes during an idyllic vacation to Italy but founders back in Bulgaria, where R., struggling with childhood trauma and still tethered to his life in Lisbon, hesitates to put down roots. The novel itself is divided into three acts. The narrator of Cleanness, older and more restless, drifts among irreconcilable roles: mentor to local students on-and-off boyfriend of R., a closeted man from Portugal and compulsive if ambivalent partner to fetishists he meets online. Cleanness is a variation on the same pattern-both books’ narrators teach English in Sofia, as did Greenwell-but is more self-reflexive in outlook, as concerned with the purpose of passion as with its fulfillment. A quick suck in the stall leads to an obsessive, manipulative attachment, which begins to erode the boundaries between the narrator’s privileged life and his lover’s desperate circumstances. What Belongs to You, Greenwell’s 2016 debut, locates that charge in the relationship between an American teacher and a young hustler he meets in the men’s room under Sofia’s National Palace of Culture. Bottom: Photograph from Sofia, Bulgaria © Mihaela Ivanova

Courtesy the artist and Edition Patrick Frey. The book arrives amid a wave of mainstream interest in the erotic lives of gay men, but its frank exploration of kink, loneliness, shame, and dark pleasures hearkens back to a less carefree period-as though to restore a charge of risk and consequence to queer sex in the era of corporate pride and Call Me by Your Name.Ī Polaroid by Pierre Keller from his monograph My Colorful Life, published by Edition Patrick Frey. Set in Bulgaria, where an expatriate teacher finds himself caught between a strained relationship and the lure of one-off S-and-M hookups, it’s an electrifying portrait of sex’s power to lacerate and liberate, to make and unmake our deepest selves. There’s a lot of crying and cumming in Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26), an arresting novel that revolves, title notwithstanding, around the upheaval and mess of desire.

Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, by Vincent Brown.

Tacky's revolt book