WAVES: An Anthology of New Gay Fiction...

WAVES: An Anthology of New Gay Fiction edited by Ethan Mordden (Vintage: $12; 249 pp.; paperback original). In his clever introduction, Mordden attempts to classify the rapidly expanding genre of gay fiction. He notes that these divisions are often bridged by “a feeling that gay writers are recording and analyzing their lives because, if they didn’t, no one would know that they had been here, including themselves.” The stories in the anthology vary widely in quality. In “Forty Wild Crushes,” Jim Provenzano uses outrageous footnotes to recount a life of longing; Richard Davis juxtaposes bitter childhood vignettes with the life of an adult Afro-American man in “Marty.” But Rex Knight’s effortfully erotic “The Number You Have Reached” reads like a reject from a skin magazine, and Mordden’s “The Hunt for Red October” displays his usual polish, but lacks the incisive content of the other stories in his “Buddies” series.