Transgender road-warrior Teri Louise Kelly’s second volume of memoirs, Last Bed on Earth, is a hilarious descent into the world of low budget, high adventure tourism in Christchurch NZ. Less vitriolic than Sex Knives and Bouillabaisse, this time around even when Kelly is heaping scorn she does it with a wry smile rather than a sneer.

The Kelly of this memoir is subversive, gleefully amoral, insightful and just a bit unbalanced. Still, she and her lady love, dominatrix Jo Buck, shine as beacons of sanity in the melee of nutjobs that surrounds them.

The biggest laugh-out-loud moment in the book is Kelly’s account of a terrifying hot air balloon ascent: screamingly funny, yes, but it’s put me off adventure holidays for life.

Last Bed on Earth is full of humour, satire and occasional touches of human warmth in a cold, often uncaring world. A fascinating, hilarious read.

Lovers of short fiction rejoice: John Bartlett’s collection of short stories, All Mortal Flesh, is a hugely satisfying read. Bartlett employs a wide range of voices and moods in these 20 tales which range from slice-of-life to science fiction, sometimes terse to the point of ambiguity, sometimes revelling in verbal fireworks.

There is a plaintive edge to many of the stories because they deal with hope and despair, illusion and disillusionment, loss and acceptance, connection and alienation: the human condition in short. Several of the stories are gay themed, the final story ‘Mates’ being particularly touching. A number of these stories have been nominated for literary awards, with ‘Hey, True Blue!’ being a winner in the 2004 Midsumma Short Story Competition.

You would go a long way to find such diversity in so relatively small a collection elsewhere. Recommended reading.

On a completely different note Drama Queers! by Frank Anthony Polito is a companion piece to his earlier novel Band Fags! Set in Michigan in 1987, it tells the story of Brad Dayton, high school senior, trombone-player, would-be actor and Total Fag. Unlike many coming of age novels, the emphasis in Drama Queers! is very definitely on the humour. Nothing in Brad’s life is straightforward, not even his burgeoning relationship with sophomore Richie Tyler. Despite being comfortable with his own homosexuality, Brad worries that he can’t be a Famous Actor and be out, too, which causes him to make some poor choices.

Packed full of 80s pop-culture references – which might be too elusive for anyone who wasn’t there – Drama Queers! is a brisk and humorous look at being 17 and on the brink of adulthood with which any person gay or straight can identify. A fun read.

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