This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

This Is How You Lose the Time War came out four years ago, but I've just gotten round to reading it. It's an oddly structured epistolary novella, concerning two female operatives on opposite sides in the time war. Red is with the Agency, while Blue works for the Garden. They start exchanging secret letters with each other, as they pass through various lives, time-strands--past and future--and differing realities. The prose is dense, and the set-up slow, but the reader is soon quite engaged. It won a Nebula and a Hugo for best novella, as well as other significant awards (from Locus, and the BSFA, etc.). I wouldn't have expected it to be a multiple award winner, though I enjoyed it.

Boys Like Us, edited by Patrick Merla

This book appeared in 1996, and at that time, according to the editor, it was a few decades in the making. It sounds like a good idea in itself, as expressed in the subtitle: gay writers tell their coming out stories. It collects some twenty-nine essays by acclaimed writers, plus an introduction by the editor. The first essay is by science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany, and it sets a high standard that I feared the subsequent essays couldn't reach, and they didn't. Delany's essay is introspective, and deeply thoughtful, in ways that most of the rest of the essays aren't, for many descend to being not so much coming out stories (drawing individual fences around that term), but merely stories of early sexual experiences. None of them are bad, most are well-written, and if personally insightful they aren't especially revealing of the societal web of meanings for the term coming out. The second most interesting essay after Delany's is that by poet Carl Phillips, which closes the book. These essays are now almost thirty years old. It would be interesting to read an entirely new collection of similar essays on what coming out means to current writers.