by Billy-Ray Belcourt
W.W. Norton & Company
5/21/2024, paperback
SKU: 9781324075943
A grieving mother calls out to her faraway son. A student forgoes the lurid appeal of dating apps in exchange for a painter's love. The anonymous voices of queer native men converge amid violent eroticism. A man just out of prison balances the uneasy weight of family and freedom, while a professor returns home to conduct research only to be haunted by a dark specter. The stories and voices in Billy-Ray Belcourt's debut story collection are buoyed by philosophical undergirding, poetic demand, and the complex relationship between aesthetics and ethics. Belcourt pirouettes through the short story form in his signature staccato voice, imagining a range of characters from all walks of native life. He is an expert in celebrating the ways Indigenous peoples make total conquest impossible.
Reviews:
"An homage and an elegy to a still-unfolding history--as intimate and hopeful as young romance, as mysterious and life-giving as family. I adore this collection." -- Tsering Yangzom Lama, author of We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies
"These characters' passionate insistence on loving and desiring and hoping, amid the existential terror of colonization--and Billy-Ray Belcourt's nuanced and attentive rendering of it--is the most revolutionary of acts." -- Vauhini Vara, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist The Immortal King Rao
"Billy-Ray Belcourt masterfully portrays the complexities of Indigenous lives, longing, and belonging through these stories. There are sentences in this collection that I didn't know I had been waiting to read; my breath caught on several of them. I suspect that readers will be letting out collective sighs while reading this book." -- Helen Knott, author of Becoming a Matriarch
About the Author:
Billy-Ray Belcourt is a writer from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is an assistant professor in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia and the founder of oteh nikan, an online magazine of LGBTQ2S+ indigenous writing. He lives in Vancouver, Canada.