YOUR BOOK: You’re Pretty Gay
PUBLISHED IN: 2021
THE AUTHOR: Drew Pisarra
THE EDITOR: Dave Kavanagh
THE PUBLISHER: Chaffinch Press
SUMMARY: In this collection of surreal short stories, author Drew Pisarra explores contemporary gay identity as it manifests everywhere from New Orleans to the North Pole. As per Darcy Buck’s introduction, his world is one in which “things do not delay in turning strange; in which weird things keep happening to us; in which fracture and fragment and almost inexplicable trains of associations are the rule; in which classic narrative forms are upended and turned inside out; in which the laws of morality are interrogated and the laws of logic warped and the laws of nature blithely ignored; in which people strive and struggle to connect authentically, in spite of the cultural forms and clumsy bodies that keep us from one another; and in which queer forever means both those people and things which are ineffably, irreconcilably odd — and also those manifestations of eros, amor, and agape that gleefully defy, refuse, subvert, and annihilate the expectations of the heteronormative, cisnormative, any-normative world.”
THE BACK STORY: In the 1990s, I toured my largely autobiographical monologues up and down the West Coast and only later realized that they might work even better on the page than on the stage. Once I had that epiphany, I switched to writing primarily for readers and not for ticketholders. That said, my internal impulses remain unchanged: to expose our flawed inner workings and to push back against conformist pressures (in as entertaining fashion as possible).
WHY THIS TITLE: I like how the title feels simultaneously playful and accusatory. It’s at once a direct confrontation and a sly wink to the reader and an invitation or an act of defiance to the person observing the reader as well.
WHY SOMEONE WOULD WANT TO READ IT: You like your fiction snack-sized and aren’t afraid of the color pink or the naked human body.
REVIEW COMMENTS:
“He states ancient truisms so cleverly and pithily it frequently made me gasp.” – Melissa Todd, Confluence
“…gives readers a mosaic of wit, surrealism, sex, queerness, memory, mortality and self-discovery.” – Kathi Wolfe, The Washington Blade
“Think of Drew Pisarra as a stand-up comic delivering free-association monologues in a highwire stage act, balancing reality and fantasy.” – Charles Rammelkamp, The London Grip
“Pisarra writes with elegant, even beautiful, prose, positing this world as a place of transition, temptation and theatre.“ – Eoghan Lyng, We Are Cult
AUTHOR PROFILE: A literary grantee of the Café Royal Cultural Foundation and Curious Elixirs: Curious Creators, Drew Pisarra is also the author of Infinity Standing Up, a ribald collection of homoerotic sonnets (“brazen and lusty and often amusing” per The Washington Post) and Publick Spanking, a collection of short fiction (“cruising on the edge of polite literature” according to Willamette Week). He once had a ventriloquist act entitled Singularly Grotesque but has since retired from the world of dummies.
AUTHOR COMMENTS: This book was 20 years in the making and pulls together every short story I’ve written in the last two decades. As such, You’re Pretty Gay is an inadvertent cultural barometer on what it can sometimes feel like to be queer in the late 20th and early 21st century.
SAMPLE CHAPTER: “A Total Knockout”: https://www.liarsleaguenyc.com/a-total-knockout-by-drew-pisarra
LOCAL OUTLETS: Powell’s Book Store: https://www.powells.com/book/youre-pretty-gay-9781838104184
WHERE ELSE TO BUY IT: Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/books/you-re-pretty-gay/9781838104184
PRICE: $16.95
CONTACT THE AUTHOR: @mistermysterio on Twitter
Snowflakes in a Blizzard 