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not-for-profit - a workers'co-op - committed to social justice | 96 Bold Street, Liverpool L1 4HY - 0151 708 7270

The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse

by Lonely Christopher - £14.99  Akashic Books (2011)
paperback    ISBN 13: 9781936070800 | ISBN 10: 1936070804

Two boys lie on a bed, one of them is already dead; they listen to Glenn Gould playing Bach and talk about suicide and love. A lonely narrator mourns the end of a relationship and the disappearance of a mysterious object as a frustrated artist jumps out of a moving car on his birthday and runs for the last streetlamp in the universe. Awkward parents and angsty teens negotiate a dark suburban landscape, searching for something they can't name, spelling out balletic sentences of failure and shame. Helicopters menace the night sky, a ! horse is murdered in a kitchen, victims go missing in swamps of ambiguity, and everybody waits for what the construction of a new road into town will bring: the end of the world or something worse.
 
The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse , a radical map of shortcomings in our daily experiences in the form of a debut story collection, presents thematically related windows into serious emotional trouble and monstrous love. Lonely Christopher combines a striking emotional grammar with an unyielding imagination in the lovely-ugly architecture of his stories.

"Lonely Christopher, as his name suggests, knows despair as only a hobo or a clown can. This knowledge animates his fiction and provides each story with a humor that belies the terrible things that happen to his men, women, children, and animals. His formal experimentation will reward readers who have been craving a Huysmans sort of Nick Drake sort of Andy Kaufman killer writer. These readers will, like all good boys and girls, go to bed happy at last."
(Kevin Killian, author of Impossible Princess and Action Kylie)
"Lonely Christopher's debut collection introduces a kind of story which simultaneously reads as new and familiar. In fact, everything here happens in the context of family: mother, father, brother, sister, lover, neighbor, friend. It is you and it is not you, it is contained and it is vast. Syntactically deft, playful with proper nouns, steadily wondrous within the quotidian, it also, remarkably, fulfills a promise: each story is indeed an excavation of The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse, which is its excellent title. Reading it gives me a perverse and giddy sensation; I was deeply happy when I finished this book."
(Rachel Levitsky, author of Neighbor and Under the Sun)

(Price & availability last checked: March 2019)

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In booklists: Gay Fiction, Gay Fiction - Short Story Collections, Writers by Surname - C,
In categories: Fiction, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexuality & Transgender,

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