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The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse
short stories by Lonely Christopher
with an introduction by Dennis Cooper

Trade Paperback Original | Fiction/Literature
ISBN-13: 978-1-936070-80-0 | $15.95 | 190 pages
Publication date: February 2011


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Dennis Cooper unveils a mesmerizing debut story collection for his Little House on the Bowery fiction series.

"[A] provocative and refreshing debut collection."
--Publishers Weekly

"Praise seems superfluous for a book as accomplished, cohesive, and devastating as Lonely Christopher's debut collection, so consider these words admiration instead, and admonishment: if you still think fiction counts for anything, then you should buy this bookĘright now."
--Dale Peck, author of What We Lost and Time To Say Goodbye

"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

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 is the author of several poetry chapbooks and the volume Into (with Christopher Sweeney and Robert Snyderman). As a librettist and playwright, his dramatic works have been published, staged in New York City and internationally, and released in Mandarin translation. He is a founding member of the small press The Corresponding Society and an editor of its biannual journal Correspondence. He lives in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.