Crawl
Stories
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- 89,00 kr
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- 89,00 kr
Utgivarens beskrivning
A darkly comic, introspective debut collection that looks beneath the surface of trans life in 2010s Seattle
People called it paradise, but baby, it wasn’t.
What to do when starting testosterone unlocks a newfound desire for men? How to respond when your boss’s boss asks if you’ve had “the surgery” and then requests you talk her niece out of transitioning? What obligation do you have to intervene in the faltering mental health of the baby trans drug dealer you’ve met only once while tripping on the acid he sold you?
The young transmasculine characters in Crawl navigate these and other questions in the dive bars, bathhouses, parks, workplaces, music venues, beaches, and college campuses of 2010s Seattle. Max Delsohn’s stories—by turns exuberant, heartfelt, tragic, and wry—portray the pleasures and pains of sex and romance, the possibilities and ambivalences of gender expression, and the joys and failures of community in a city and a time that has branded itself a radical queer utopia but proves much more complicated in reality.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Delsohn debuts with a dryly humorous and poignant collection featuring an eclectic cast of characters navigating trans life in 2010s Seattle. The title entry sees 26-year-old warehouse worker Jack wondering if he'll ever find love. Having struck out after a night of barhopping, he winds up at a bathhouse where he knows he can at least find sex. After the college student protagonist of "All Time Low" is left by her girlfriend for a trans man, she begins dating Julie, a self-identified "straight girl" who makes her feel "disgusting." In "Same Old," trans man Simon's weekend acid trip is interrupted by a "cry for help" in the form of a voicemail from the recently transitioned Harold, his sister's drug dealer, a "friendless, baby-trans burner who felt stuck in the wrong world, the wrong life." Aware that others mock Harold and routinely call him by his dead name, and increasingly worried about his well-being, Simon reluctantly sets out to check on him. Throughout, the stories' bold sex scenes often give way to humor, as in "Sex Is a Leisure Activity," when the narrator, a transmasculine comedian, confesses his ignorance about the purpose of a cock ring; or vulnerable emotions, as when Jack convinces himself he's experiencing love while having sex with a stranger. These exacting stories seethe with blunt honesty.
