Boy catching, bird watching.

Blind Items

* Matthew Rettenmund

* St. Martin's

* $21.95

Birds of America

* Lorrie Moore

* Knopf * $23

What happens when a 32-year-old paunchy pornographer meets a closeted television hunk? In real life, nothing. But in Matthew Rettenmund's highly improbable and amusing yarn, they fall in love. Brimming with mock gossip columns, self-deprecating humor, and Jon-Erik Hexum references, Blind Items follows Manhattan gay porn scribe David Greer as he ventures where no man has gone before: into an out-and-proud relationship with a gorgeous male megastar. The author of Boy Culture, Totally Awesome 80s, and Encyclopedia Madonnica, Rettenmund again flaunts his flair for pop minutiae with a giddy tale that reserves Hollywood closets for bustiers, not boys.

For anyone who's known sublime connection and abject alienation (preferably in the same day), Lorrie Moore's exquisite third collection of short fiction offers a comic and decidedly dark catharsis. With 12 stories whose protagonists veer from wounded women to hapless homos, Birds of America is full of wiseacres and washed-up types who haven't quite given up on life but have stopped hoping for more. Particularly poignant is her award-winning semiautobiographical account of an infant son's cancer, "People Like That Are the Only People Here," while "What You Want to Do Fine" is probably the strangest, most endearing romance of male migrant lovers ever written.

Bahr writes for The New York Times, Time Out New York, and New York magazine.