This book is feisty; whether it thrills or exhausts you reveals your own tolerance for outré reading.
Purnell, a performance artist, musician, filmmaker, and writer, dives deep into the pathologies and delights of sex among gay men in this dizzying novel.
In these pages, the unnamed, formerly homeless protagonist, a “jaded judgmental borderline misanthrope” who’s also really funny, describes so much sex with a “nameless void of men” that it’s a wonder he doesn’t rub his fingers raw from undoing his pants so often. There’s sex on the protagonist’s European concert tour, bad sex with a Satanist in America (“if this was Satan’s best sex warrior it stood to reason why Satanism in general was such a PR nightmare”), and an obsession with a straight co-worker that compels the protagonist to masturbate in the office while watching him. Structured in short vignettes, the book is mostly told in a confessional first person, which make the stories feel autofictional. There are so many short episodes of sex that the book reads more like a diary—a vibrant, saucy, dishy, punk diary. One example: The protagonist, feeling lonely, hires a sex worker to act like a boyfriend, so the guy, just doing what he’s paid for, keeps whispering “I love you, boyfriend” in the protagonist’s ear. “He was beginning to feel like a boyfriend in that he was already annoying the fuck out of me,” Purnell writes in a typically knowing, self-lacerating insight. There are moments when Purnell steps back from offending delicate sensibilities to documenting real sadness and drawing wisdom in the process. The protagonist encounters a former boyfriend, “once a big beautiful star” who “has collapsed in on its own weight and turned into a black hole.” This man takes the protagonist to his parents’ home for Thanksgiving to an emotional void; his parents serve TV dinners for the holiday meal. “But this was one of the many holes he had in himself that he always made visible to me,” Purnell writes. The only nagging question this book engenders is why it’s packaged as fiction at all; it reads more like a memoir/manifesto that gay sex is still a rebellious act.
This book is feisty; whether it thrills or exhausts you reveals your own tolerance for outré reading.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-3745-3898-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A riveting collection in which downtrodden, vindictive, and occasionally just plain evil women choose violence at every turn.
A 16-story anthology highlights a diverse list of authors who let their protagonists embrace their unhinged natures.
A smart-mouthed child locked inside a shed discovers a match and the intoxicating allure of fire (“All You Have Is Your Fire” by Yah Yah Scholfield). A disabled teenager takes the Devil, named Max, as her girlfriend through the summoning power of masturbation (“The Devil’s Doorbell” by Amanda Leduc). A Black woman ruthlessly disposes of men guilty of “the crime of wasting a Black woman’s time” (“Fuckboy Museum” by Deesha Philyaw). The protagonists of these stories bring new meaning to unsavory and unhinged and prove that characters—women especially—need not be well behaved or morally pure to have delightful literary value. Ranging from merely unlikable to downright deplorable, these women leave bodies, burning buildings, and broken plates in their wakes in these deeply disturbing and sublime narratives. The latter half of the collection is heavy on speculative fiction and magical realism. In Chantal V. Johnson's “MS Wrong,” Valerie contemplates the benefits of an Impenetrable Body Mod that seals up “all three holes” but instead turns to drugging men with an aphrodisiac—“ethical angle” aside—to enjoy mutually pleasurable kinky sex. Alison Rumfitt's “Buffalo” features a genderqueer woman who falls under suspicion when the skinned bodies of young women keep popping up in the neighborhood—just because she happens to own eight skin suits (“made from a clever mix of plastic, latex, and lycra,” not real flesh, thank you very much). While the book has a few weak links, standouts include Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s “The Monolith,” in which oncologist Jane Chun obsessively works to destroy the budding career of a young female medical student; Lauren Groff’s “Amaranth,” in which the title character spends years following her father’s death calculating the best way to ruin her mother’s happiness; and Chana Porter’s “Aquafina,” which takes the form of poetry written by the narrator about her best friend, whom she lusts after and envies in equal measure.
A riveting collection in which downtrodden, vindictive, and occasionally just plain evil women choose violence at every turn.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781950539871
Page Count: 237
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
A beautifully thorough, well-balanced collection.
In Bilal’s debut, Black American Muslims explore the intricacies of their faith and community.
Taqwa is tasked with writing her father’s eulogy—never an easy assignment, but made more difficult in Taqwa’s case first by the fact that her father’s ghost keeps appearing; second, an alternative narrative to her father’s life has emerged; and finally, her father’s commitment to Islam—he was an imam—may have wavered at the end of his life. The night before the interment, Taqwa sits up late, but in the morning, the eulogy—alas—has not written itself. This story, “Due North,” is one of many meticulously probing stories in Bilal’s debut collection. Each story describes the experiences of Black Muslims with varying levels of commitment to their faith, including at least one nonbeliever. It’s a rare glimpse into a community that has received almost no literary attention, and Bilal is a skillful guide—sympathetic, nuanced, searching, but not uncritical. She describes one character as having “the look of someone who would always be limited by her own cunning, no hope of ever growing wise.” In “Candy for Hanif,” Sister Norah cares for her cognitively delayed son long after her husband has died. “In that moment,” Bilal writes, “the entire city looked to her like a cage, placing limits on what she could know of the world.” Bilal seems to particularly excel in the longer pieces, when she has room to explore. Still, despite the many, many attributes that make up this fine collection, there is a sameness to the structure and style of narration in many of the stories, especially those that are voiced in first person. The narrators tend to resemble each other. That’s something for Bilal to watch out for in later books—clearly, there will be many more.
A beautifully thorough, well-balanced collection.Pub Date: July 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781982191818
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
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