Queer and Alone

By Jim Strahs

Suggested price: $16.00 $16.00

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Description

Monrovia. Bali. Bombay. Cayman Islands. Hollywood. The names of faraway places dot the pages of Queer and Alone like thousands of islands in a deep blue sea. Indeed, the hero – or is he an ironic anti-hero? – of this novel is a man literally at sea. He is Desmond Farrquahr who boards a steamer bound for Hong Kong by way of the Cape of Good Hope. Looking for experience, taking in the sights, hoping. For what?

Queer and Alone is a wildly exuberant travelogue as monologue, an eccentric American’s view of tourism. One might call it a “scatalogical romance,” with a story and a girl in every port. “It’s all part of the novel experience of being there,” Farrquahr wordplays with the reader. As narrator of the novel he shows off incredibly sly linguistic gifts that turn even the slightest image or sound into the dazzling rhythms of word magic.

Whether it’s describing racial fantasy films in Africa, investigating murder in Bombay, or seducing stately women in staterooms, Farrquahr manages to have the most ingenious takes on culture. In one of the most funny scenes in the novel the narrator is seen eating several (dis)courses of a chopstick dinner that makes the ideologies of both East and West seem like entangled sesame noodles. Tourism moves closer to zany anthopology whenever Farrquahr acts as guide.

Desmond Farrquahr is a very queer fellow if judged by any conventional standards. But isn’t the world itself a queer place these days?

Queer and Alone is available for purchase as a paperback or DRM-free epub directly from Whiskey Tit.  You can also purchase the paperback or Kindle version from Amazon.  Or I can tattoo the entire text to your torso while smoking clove cigarettes. Contact the publisher for that and other custom orders.

BOOK DETAILS

Publication date: 25 August 2015

Paperback price: 14

WHAT THEY'RE SAYING

This fairly describes the central assertion and dilemma of the book, the use of irony and satire to subvert representational art and the drive to force art into a purpose other than desire. This wayward, dirty, knowing and intelligent novel is a pleasure to read, an anarchic riposte to puritanical political/sexual earnestness and an emetic designed to both purge and go down easily.

– Jon Frankel

A fresh insult awaits Des in every port, and much of what goes on is howlingly funny. Strahs, author of the nonfiction Seed Journal, has an ear for sly innuendo and an eye for the ridiculous.

– Publishers Weekly