Brian Alessandro

Dec 12, 2024 | glreview.org | Brian Alessandro

QUEERDirected by Luca GuadagninoReleased November 27, 2024Like then novel by William S. Burroughs on which it is based, Luca Guadagnino’s film adaptation of Queer is less about homosexuality than about the agonies and ecstasies of being a soul trapped in an aging, alienated body. Written in the mid-1950s but not released until 1985, Queer is Burroughs’ partial sequel to 1953’s Junkie.

May 7, 2024 | newsday.com | Brian Alessandro

Colm Toibin begins “Long Island” (Scribner, $28), his sequel to 2009’s “Brooklyn” with a cruel shock. Eilis and Tony, the protagonists, are in marital peril. The time is 1976, 20 years after the events of “Brooklyn.” By the time the novel begins, Eilis and Tony have been long settled in Lindenhurst and have raised a family.

Jan 1, 2024 | newsbreak.com | Brian Alessandro

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Jan 1, 2024 | newsday.com | Brian Alessandro

What is it in our culture that creates a George Santos? Though his lies were unusual, the disgraced congressman from Long Island is not a unique phenomenon. Many social-media profiles feature largely fabricated or at least highly curated personas. Countless bestselling memoirs are riddled with exaggerations or outright inventions for the sake of compelling narratives.

Aug 21, 2023 | newsday.com | Brian Alessandro

Brooks Anderson, the protagonist of PJ McIlvaine’s novel, “A Good Man,” provides the kind of insolent first-person narration that is reminiscent of John Self’s in Martin Amis' “Money” or Mickey Sabbath’s in Philip Roth’s “Sabbath’s Theater.” Or even any one of the hard-boiled detectives from a Mickey Spillane or Dashiell Hammett procedural.