LGBTQI+

A 10th anniversary edition of this field defining work—an intellectual inspiration for a generation of LGBTQ scholars 

Cruising Utopia arrived in 2009 to insist that queerness must be reimagined as a futurity-bound phenomenon, an insistence on the potentiality of another world that would crack open the pragmatic present. Part manifesto, part love-letter to the past and the future, José Esteban Muñoz argued that the here and now were not enough and issued an urgent call for the revivification of the queer political imagination.

On the anniversary of its original publication, this edition includes two essays that extend and expand the project of Cruising Utopia, as well as a new foreword by the current editors of Sexual Cultures, the book series he co-founded with Ann Pellegrini 20 years ago. This 10th anniversary edition celebrates the lasting impact that Cruising Utopia has had on the decade of queer of color critique that followed and introduces a new generation of readers to a future not yet here.

Margaret Mead Made Me Gay is the intellectual autobiography of cultural anthropologist Esther Newton, a pioneer in gay and lesbian studies. Chronicling the development of her ideas from the excitement of early feminism in the 1960s to friendly critiques of queer theory in the 1990s, this collection covers a range of topics such as why we need more precise sexual vocabularies, why there have been fewer women doing drag than men, and how academia can make itself more hospitable to queers. It brings together such classics as “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian” and “Dick(less) Tracy and the Homecoming Queen” with entirely new work such as “Theater: Gay Anti-Church.”

Newton’s provocative essays detail a queer academic career while offering a behind-the-scenes view of academic homophobia. In four sections that correspond to major periods and interests in her life—”Drag and Camp,” “Lesbian-Feminism,” “Butch,” and “Queer Anthropology”—the volume reflects her successful struggle to create a body of work that uses cultural anthropology to better understand gender oppression, early feminism, theatricality and performance, and the sexual and erotic dimensions of fieldwork. Combining personal, theoretical, and ethnographic perspectives, Margaret Mead Made Me Gay also includes photographs from Newton’s personal and professional life.

With wise and revealing discussions of the complex relations between experience and philosophy, the personal and the political, and identities and practices, Margaret Mead Made Me Gay is important for anyone interested in the birth and growth of gay and lesbian studies.

What constitutes a real man or woman in the twenty-first century? Since birth control pills, erectile dysfunction remedies, and factory-made testosterone and estrogen were developed, biology is definitely no longer destiny.

In this penetrating analysis of gender, Paul B. Preciado shows the ways in which the synthesis of hormones since the 1950s has fundamentally changed how gender and sexual identity are formulated, and how the pharmaceutical and pornography industries are in the business of creating desire. This riveting continuation of Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality also includes Preciado's diaristic account of his own use of testosterone every day for one year, and its mesmerizing impact on his body as well as his imagination.

I Should Have Known Better is a sequel to the sleeper hit I'm Open to Anything (2019), expanding the original's scope and ambition.

I Should Have Known Better's first person narrator, while working at a dead-end job in Los Angeles during the mid-1990s, reconnects with his best friend Moira, recently returned from Central America, and makes a new friend, Bernie, who teaches the history of photography. The two of them convince him to pursue a master's degree as a way of escaping the unrewarding life of a video store clerk. Once the narrator is exposed to an academic environment, he takes a dim view of the education that art school has to offer, but is happy to meet a group of talented fellow students who become close friends. He encounters a number of art world figures, ranging from the brilliant to the abject, who disabuse him of his illusions. The narrator has his most instructive experiences off campus, especially a love affair with the handsome and mercurial Temo, an insolent rich kid who leads a double life. Together they explore their sexual limits in scenes of bracing explicitness. I Should Have Known Better bears witness to the last gasp of Los Angeles bohemia at the end of the twentieth century.

The novel paints precise portraits of inspired eccentrics devoted to pursuing their dreams, "shopping artists" who believe in nothing but hedonism, and latter-day leftists who find themselves directionless after the fall of communism. Above all, the book pays tribute to the impulsive experiments and intense friendships of youth.

A perverse and explicit new take on the coming of age novel, William E. Jones's I'm Open to Anything explores bohemian Southern California of the late 1980s and early 90s, before gentrification ruined everything.

The book's narrator flees a crumbling industrial wasteland in the Midwest and finds himself in sunny Los Angeles without a car, working in a neighborhood video store and spending many hours watching films. He explores his adopted city and befriends a number of men, most of them immigrants, who teach him the finer points of sex. He acquires the skill of fisting, giving his partners intense pleasure, and at the same time hearing the stories of their lives. They too have fled their hometowns: one to escape torture at the hands of a Salvadoran death squad; another to study anthropology after years of wandering and religious questioning.

Alternating between explicit scenes of kinky sex and intimate conversations about matters of life and death, I'm Open to Anything is a porno novel of rare ambition and humor. The book recalls Olympia Press's heyday, when authors made quick money churning out dirty books, but couldn't hide the intellectual obsessions that made them writers in the first place.

William E. Jones's previous book, True Homosexual Experiences (also published by We Heard You Like Books), a biography of Straight to Hell's iconoclastic editor Boyd McDonald, celebrates the frank, raunchy language of the first queer 'zine. Jones brings the same unsparing and profane attitude to I'm Open to Anything, his debut novel.

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue is a non-fiction book written by science fiction author Samuel R. Delany and published in 1999 by the New York University Press.

The book is a compilation of two separate essays: Times Square Blue and ...Three, Two, One, Contact: Times Square Red.

This 20th Anniversary Edition contains an introduction by Robert Reid-Pharr.

Manchester, UK. 2080.
It is a subculture whereby people are sexually attracted to the idea of transmitting and receiving STI’s. It started as a counter-culture against computer algorithms that determine every aspect of people’s lives, from careers to romantic interests, where they live, all over the world. The Virosexuals decided to alter their own bodies in order to subvert the algorithm. Now treated as non humans and thus ignored, Virosexuals like Amygdala are left to survive on their own…

Amygdala’s world consists of: her open relationship with Cel, her philosophical musings and drugged-up rants with her best friend Skunk/Winny, as well as her pursuit of all the completely curable (and thus fetishised) meatspace ‘zeases the club scene can offer. She tries to negotiate her body, her sexuality and her desires and find the source of the ‘Petitmort' threat…!

Amygdala’s dealer ran off on her. She’s out of estrogen, and so when Alejandro offers her a bountiful supply of ‘mones if she works for him – doing what? – she’s not super sure… What she does know: ESCHATOS 2.0 is trying to kill her. There’s a rumour buzzing on The Chat. A deadly virus, nicknamed ‘Petitmort’, is going around. It was manufactured by ESCHATOS 2.0, and maybe only those who have installed the latest update of the Treehouse Link are susceptible. Could Alejandro’s mission for Amygdala be connected to this virus sweeping the underground kink and BDSM scene?

Orion J. Facey's The Virosexuals, the author’s first novel, is a science-fantasy you won’t regret plugging into.

The Book Cover is Artwork by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley
Design and Typeface by Atelier Carvalho Bernau
Editing by Taylor Le Melle
Copy Editing by Natasha Lall
Production by Daniella Valz Gen, Ima-Abasi Okon and Rehana Zaman
Pages: 280
Dimensions: mm × mm
Published: 30 June 2021

Vice Versa is on of the first known lesbian magazine in the world. Lisa Ben wrote, edited, printed and distributed the magazine for nine months in Los Angeles in the late 1940s. This publication gathers the nine issues she has published.

Lisa Ben explained in an interview: "I would type it out during working hours. I had never enough work—I was a fast typist. And my boss would say: 'Well, I don't care what you do if your work is done. But I don't want you to there and knit or read a magazine... I want you to look busy.' So I had plenty to keep me busy and that's how I put together VICE VERSA... I used the office stapling machine. I used the manila folders form the office, and I didn't feel a bit guilty about it! I should have, but I didn't."

An intimate, urgent and riotous account of masculinity, whiteness, queerness and belief in America.

In winter 2018, Gregg Bordowitz performed a three-part lecture series at the New Museum as part of Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon. Each evening, he explored an avatar of masculinity that was formative to him as he came of age as an outer-borough child of Jewish immigrants, then as an artist-activist in Manhattan at the dawn of the AIDS crisis: the rock star, the rabbi and the comedian. He merged personal and political history, ribald humor and social criticism, performer and persona.

Some Styles of Masculinity is a self-portrait and an essay on upheaval and plague, based on transcripts of the eponymous series, which Bordowitz has reimagined for the page. He asserts that gender can't be separated from ethnicity, sexuality, class or nationality, and he connects these aspects of himself through personal anecdotes as well as reflections on whiteness, diaspora, comedy and Jewish mysticism. Some Styles of Masculinity evokes David Antin's "talk poems," Maggie Nelson's "autotheory," David France's How to Survive a Plague and Wayne Koestenbaum's casually erudite criticism. This book is a winding, intimate, urgent, freewheeling account of thinking and enduring in difficult times.

Gregg Bordowitz (born 1964) is the author of Glenn Ligon: Untitled (I Am a Man) (2018), General Idea: Imagevirus (Afterall Books, 2010) and The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings, 1986-2003 (2004). He was an early participant in ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), where he cofounded several video collectives.

A look back in text and images at AA Bronson 's (collective) production between 2013 and 2018.

A nocturnal secret ritual performed by two naked men in a hotel room in the Netherlands; a woven tent where the artist dressed as a mage encounters visitors to share their traumas; buttplugs adorned with rooster feathers; a collection of queer zines; anal-sprayed tartan paintings; a zen garden of mugwort. A few of the singular artistic gestures AA Bronson committed in the last few years are united in this book.

After his General Idea partners, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal, passed away in 1994, AA Bronson had to learn how to keep on living by himself, inventing a personal identity without his former companions, creating a new community of work, friendship and love. These issues have been at the core of his art in the last 25 years. He has developed a work where collaboration with other artists, especially younger queer artists, and creation of a social bond are central.

AA Bronson's House of Shame aims to emphasize this social dimension in his work through an overview of a series of exhibitions he made between 2013 and 2018. These are shows that bring together a community of artists; shows where performances and rituals, often invisible, contribute to the creation of a shared experience; a unique blend of art, friendship, collaboration, spirituality and humour.

The book is in two-parts. An initial monographic section, which includes an essay and an interview with the artist, brings together the works and the exhibitions. In the second, choral part, friends have been invited to bear witness and write a sort of 'journal de bord,' telling the tale of five years of the artist's community life.

With a foreword by Vincent Simon, a text by Paul Clinton, and an interview by Frédéric Bonnet, and contributions from Philip Aarons, Defne Ayas, Elijah Burger, Matthias Herrmann, Richard John Jones, Bradford Kessler, Terence Koh, Sholem Krishtalka, Mark Jan Krayenhoff van de Leur, Gareth Long, Chrysanne Stathacos, Scott Treleaven, and Louwrien Wijers.

First French translation of José Esteban Muñoz's field defining work—an intellectual inspiration for a generation of LGBTQ scholars.

Cruiser l'utopie describes a movement, a drifting advance between theory, philosophy, art criticism and personal narrative. The works cited, narrated, are mixed with family or individual narrative and more academic considerations. This practice of queer theory and aesthetics is part of a new interpretation of hope as perceived by philosopher Ernst Bloch, articulated with black radical thought and the poetic research of authors such as Fred Moten and Eileen Myles. 

Muñoz focuses here on the period of the Stonewall revolts (New York, 1969) and analyzes, for example, the works of Frank O'Hara, King Jone/Amiri Baraka, Andy Warhol, Kevin Avance, Samuel R. Delany, Fred Herko, Jill Johnston, Ray Johnson. Queer theory as a study has a new way of researching and writing, a form of hybridity between philosophy and cultural studies. The critique is, as if by anticipation, contained in the counter-normative artistic practice and daily life whose narratives, both subjective and historical, hint at a queer future, a place of transformation and liberation. 

The text, translated from English by Alice Wambergue, is accompanied by a preface by Elisabeth Lebovici and a poem by Fred Moten.

José Esteban Muñoz (1967 - 2013) is a queer scholar and art theorist. Author of The Sense of Brown (published posthumously in 2020), Cruising Utopia, the Aftermath and Elsewhere of Queer Advent (2009), and Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999), he edited the collective works Pop Out: Queer Warhol (1996) and Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latin/o America (1997). Muñoz has long taught in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and edited the Sexual Cultures series at New University Press, where he has published works such as Jack Halberstam and Samuel Delany.

In this third Why I Write volume, Eileen Myles addresses the social, political, and aesthetic conditions that shape their work.

In this raucous meditation, Eileen Myles offers an intimate glimpse into creativity's immediacy. With erudition and wit, Myles recounts their early years as an awakening writer; existential struggles with landlords; storied moments with neighbors, friends, and lovers; and the textures and identities of cities and the country that reveal the nature of writing as presence in time.  

For Myles, time's "optic quality" is what enables writing in the first place, as attention, as devotion, as excess. It is this chronologized vision that enables the writer to love the world as it presently is, lending love a linguistic permanence amid social and political systems that threaten to eradicate it. Irreverent, generous, and always insightful, For Now is a candid record of the creative process from one of our most beloved artists.

Paperback edition - 2021.

Harnessing street protest as a poetic formation, Villainy exhibits the desires that bring queers into public space.

Andrea Abi-Karam answers the call to action for poetry itself to become the radical accomplice it was destined to be in their second book, Villainy. In order to live through the grief of the Ghostship Fire & the Muslim Ban, Villainy foments political action in public spaces, and indexes the various emotional states, such as rage, revelry, fear, grief, and desire to which queers must tend during protest. In scenes loaded with glitter, broken glass, and cum, Abi-Karam insists that in order to shatter the rising influence of new fascism we must embrace the collective work of antifascists, street medics, and queer exhibitionists and that the safety that we risk is reckless and necessary. Disruptive and demanding, these punk poems embody direct action and invite the audience into the desire-filled slippage between public sex and demonstration. At heart, Villainy aims to destroy all levels of hierarchy to establish a participatory, temporary autonomous zone in which the targeted other can thrive. 

Published September 2021

Andrea Abi-Karam is an arab-american genderqueer punk poet-performer cyborg, writing on the art of killing bros, the intricacies of cyborg bodies, trauma and delayed healing. Selected by Bhanu Khapil, Andrea's debut EXTRATRANSMISSION (Kelsey Street Press, 2019), is a poetic critique of the U.S. military's role in the War on Terror. Simone White selected their second assemblage, Villainy for publication in Fall 2021 at Nightboat Books. With Kay Gabriel, they co-edited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics released by Nightboat Books in November 2020. They are a Leo currently obsessed with queer terror and convertibles.

The publication 'What we could have become: Reflections on queer feminist filmmaking' explores the radical potentials of care and speculative fiction in the context of queer feminist collective filmmaking. Departing from the experimental short film The Book of S of I (2020) by Malu Blume, this publication is a documentation of the film project just as much as its own artistic medium. Using a performative mode, it weaves together film stills with unreleased set photography, creating a visual narration that reflects caring and kinship through a queer feminist – and femme – lens.

With a foreword by editor Sascia Bailer, the booklet contains a transcript of the film’s narrative voice over and an essay on queer utopian care in the context of The Book of S of I and its making, both written by the artist Malu Blume. The publication concludes with a conversation between Malu Blume and their co-producers, friends and artistic collaborators Ipek Hamzaoglu, Laura Nitsch and Sophie Utikal, moderated by Sascia Bailer. In this conversation the artists and discuss the chances and challenges of collective film making in the context of producing The Book of S of I.

Malu Blume is a Berlin-based artist who works at the intersections of art, performance, film and education. In 2016 they completed a master's degree in Critical Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Malu Blume has been the co-founder and member of several collective projects on queer feminism, archival politics, friendship and collaborative knowledge production.

McKenzie Wark combines an autobiographical account of her relationship with Kathy Acker with her transgender reading of Acker's writing to outline Acker's philosophy of embodiment and its importance for theorizing the trans experience.

Over the decades readers have found a punk Acker, a feminist Acker, a queer Acker, a kink Acker, and an avant-garde Acker. In Philosophy for Spiders, McKenzie Wark adds a trans Acker.

Wark recounts her memories of Acker (with whom she had a passionate affair) and gives a comprehensive reading of her published and archived works. Wark finds not just an inventive writer of fiction who pressed against the boundaries of gender but a theorist whose comprehensive philosophy of life brings a conceptual intelligence to the everyday life of those usually excluded from philosophy's purview.

As Wark shows, Acker's engagement with topics such as masturbation, sadism, body-building, and penetrative sex are central to her distinct phenomenology of the body that theorizes the body's relation to others, the city, and technology.

Guillaume Dustan' first three novels, published in French between 1996 and 1998, describing the narrator's sexual odyssey through a Paris still haunted by AIDS. 

This volume collects a suite of three wildly entertaining and trailblazing short novels by the legendary French anti-assimilationist LGBTQ+ writer Guillaume Dustan. Published sequentially in France between 1996 and 1998, the three novels are exuberant and deliberately affectless accounts of the narrator's sexual odyssey through a Parisian club and bath scene still haunted by AIDS.  

In My Room (1996) takes place almost entirely in the narrator's bedroom. The middle volume, I'm Going Out Tonight (1997) finds him venturing out onto the gay scene in one long night. Finally, in Stronger Than Me(1998) the narrator reflects on his early life, which coincided with the appearance and spread of the AIDS virus in France.  

A close contemporary of Dennis Cooper, Brett Easton Ellis, Kevin Killian, and Gary Indiana, Guillaume Dustan's deadpan autofiction is at once satirical and intimate, and completely contemporary.

It's 1993 and Paul Polydoris tends bar at the only gay club in a university town thrumming with politics and partying. He studies queer theory, has a dyke best friend, makes zines, and is a flaneur with a rich dating life. But Paul's also got a secret: he's a shapeshifter. Oscillating wildly from Riot Grrrl to leather cub, Paul transforms his body and his gender at will as he crosses the country; a journey and adventure through the deep queer archives of struggle and pleasure. Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is a riotous, razor-sharp bildungsroman whose hero/ine wends his/her way through a world gutted by loss, pulsing with music, and opening into an array of intimacy and connections.

"HOT" (Maggie Nelson) - "TIGHT" (Eileen Myles) - "DEEP" (Michelle Tea)

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is a riotous, razor-sharp bildungsroman whose hero/ine wends his/her way through a world gutted by loss, pulsing with music, and opening into an array of intimacy and connections.

From iconic feminist writer Gail Scott comes Permanent Revolution, a collection of new essays gathered alongside a recreation of her groundbreaking text, Spaces Like Stairs. In conversation with other writers working in queer/feminist avant-garde trajectories, including l'écriture-au-féminin in Québec and continental New Narrative, these essays provide an evolutionary snapshot of Scott's ongoing prose experiment that hinges the matter of writing to ongoing social upheaval. Scott herself points to the heart of this book, writing, "Where there is no emergency, there is likely no real experiment."

With a Foreword by Zoe Whittall and an Afterword by Margaret Christakos.

Gail Scott is the author of Spare Parts (1981), Heroine (1987, re-issued in 2019 with an introduction by Eileen Myles), Main Brides (1993), My Paris (1999), Spare Parts Plus Two (2002), and The Obituary (2010). Her essays are collected in Spaces Like Stairs (1989) and in La Théorie, un dimanche (1988) which was translated into English as Theory, A Sunday (2013). Scott is co-editor of the New Narrative anthology: Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (2004). Her translation of Michael Delisle's Le désarroi du matelot was shortlisted for a 2001 Governor General's Literary Award. A memoir, based in Lower Manhattan during the early Obama years, is forthcoming. Scott lives in Montréal.

In 1979, JEB self-published her first book, Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians. In a work that was revolutionary for its era, JEB made photographs of lesbians from different ages and backgrounds in their everyday lives—working, playing, raising families, and striving to remake their worlds. The photographs were accompanied by writings from acclaimed authors including Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Joan Nestle, and others. Various women pictured in the book also shared their personal stories. Eye to Eye signaled a radical new way of seeing, moving lesbian lives from the margins to the center, and reversing a history of invisibility. More than just a book, it was an affirmation of the existence of lesbians that helped to propel a political movement. Reprinted for the first time in forty years, Eye to Eye is a faithful reproduction of a work that still resonates today. This edition features additional essays from artist and writer Tee Corinne, former World Cup soccer player Lori Lindsey, and photographer Lola Flash.

Paul Preciado's controversial 2019 lecture at the École de la Cause Freudienne annual conference, published in a definitive translation for the first time. 

In November 2019, Paul Preciado was invited to speak in front of 3,500 psychoanalysts at the École de la Cause Freudienne's annual conference in Paris. Standing in front of the profession for whom he is a mentally ill person suffering from gender dysphoria, Preciado draws inspiration in his lecture from Kafka's Report to an Academy, in which a monkey tells an assembly of scientists that human subjectivity is a cage comparable to one made of metal bars.  

Speaking from his own mutant cage, Preciado does not so much criticize the homophobia and transphobia of the founders of psychoanalysis as demonstrate the discipline's complicity with the ideology of sexual difference dating back to the colonial era, an ideology which is today rendered obsolete by technological advances allowing us to alter our bodies and procreate differently. Preciado calls for a radical transformation of psychological and psychoanalytic discourse and practices, arguing for a new epistemology capable of allowing for a multiplicity of living bodies without reducing the body to its sole heterosexual reproductive capability, and without legitimizing hetero-patriarchal and colonial violence.  

Causing a veritable outcry among the assembly, Preciado was heckled and booed and unable to finish. The lecture, filmed on smartphones, was published online, where fragments were transcribed, translated, and published with no regard for exactitude. With this volume, Can the Monster Speak? is published in a definitive translation for the first time.

Variations is the debut short story collection from one of Britain’s most compelling voices, Juliet Jacques. Using fiction inspired by found material and real-life events, Variations explores the history of transgender Britain with lyrical, acerbic wit. 

Variations travels from Oscar Wilde’s London to austerity-era Belfast via inter-war Cardiff, a drag bar in Liverpool just after the decriminalisation of homosexuality, Manchester’s protests against Clause 28, and Brighton in the 2000s. Through diary entries of an illicit love affair, an oral history of a contemporary political collective; a 1920s academic paper to a 1990s film script; a 1950s memoir to a series of 2014 blog posts, Jacques rewrites and reinvigorates a history so often relegated to stale police records and sensationalist news headlines.

Innovative and fresh, Variations is a bold and beautiful book of stories unheard; until now.

A riotous, hilarious, and heart-breaking cult novel about growing up black, queer, and punk.

When DeShawn hears news of his uncle's death, his riotous big-city life in San Francisco is abruptly put on hold while he travels back to his Alabama hometown for the funeral.

While there, he’s hit by flashbacks of growing up queer and black in the ‘80s South, of a youth filled with strong women, bewildered boys, and messed up queers. Wading through prickly reminders of his childhood, of sweltering Sundays, church, family, and the men he once knew, DeShawn reconnects with his old self and the ghosts of his past.

A raw, dirty, hilarious, and heartbreaking novel about the experiences that shape us, Since I Laid My Burden Down asks the intimate question: who deserves love?

Brontez Purnell is a writer, musician, dancer, filmmaker, and performance artist. He is the author of a graphic novel, a novella, a children's book, and the novel Since I Laid My Burden Down. The recipient of a 2018 Whiting Writers' Award for Fiction, he was named one of the 32 Black Male Writers of Our Time by The New York Times Magazine. Purnell is also the frontman for the band the Younger Lovers, a co-founder of the experimental dance group the Brontez Purnell Dance Company, the creator of the renowned cult zine Fag School, and the director of several short films, music videos, and the documentary Unstoppable Feat: The Dances of Ed Mock. He lives in Oakland, California.

Transgressive, foulmouthed, and wildly funny, Brontez Purnell's 100 Boyfriends is a filthy, unforgettable, and brutally profound ode to queer love in its most messy of variations. From one-night stands to recurring lovers, Purnell's characters sleep with their co-worker's husbands, expose themselves to racist neighbours, date Satanists, and drink their way out of trouble, all the while fighting - and often losing - the urge to self-sabotage.

A horny, punk love song full of imperfect intimacies, 100 Boyfriends takes readers on a riotous journey through dirty warehouses and gentrified bars, from dysfunctional houseshares to desolate farming towns in Alabama. Drawing us into a community of glorious misfits living on the margins of a white supremacist, heteronormative society, iconoclastic storyteller Brontez Purnell gives us an uncompromising vision of desire, desperation, race, loneliness, and queerness that will devastate as much as it entertains.

As storm clouds gather, portending a final reckoning, ersatz rave-cult leader Vernon Subutex decides to return to Paris. Even if it means leaving behind his disciples. He has to. He’s got a dentist’s appointment.

Back in the city, he learns that an old friend from his days homeless on the Paris streets has died and left him half of a lottery win. But when Vernon returns to his commune with news of this windfall, it’s not long before his disciples turn on each other. Such good fortune does not accord with the principles Vernon has handed down.

Meanwhile, the monstrous film producer Laurent Dopalet is determined to make Aïcha and Céleste pay for their attack on him, whatever it takes and whoever gets hurt. And, before long, the whole of Paris will be reeling in the wake of the terrorist atrocities of 2015 and 2016, and all the characters in this kaleidoscopic portrait of a city and era will be forced to confront one another one last time. In the wake of all this chaos and hate, the question will rise again: After all he’s been through, who is Vernon Subutex? And the answer: He is the future.

Virginie Despentes’s epochal trilogy ends with Vernon Subutex 3—in fire, blood, and even forgiveness. But not everyone will survive to see the dawning of the golden age of Subutex.