In the end it was picked up by editor Jackson Howard at MCDxFSG, who reached out after reading Purnell’s debut novel Since I Laid My Burden Down, which received the Whiting Award for fiction in 2018. On a Zoom call, Purnell tells me it was originally meant to be published by City Lights Books, an independent publisher based in San Francisco. A fixture of the Bay Area’s DIY punk scene for the past twenty-odd years, Purnell is a musician, artist, writer, dancer, and filmmaker whose most recent two books somehow manage to chart the terrain of trauma without becoming excessively melodramatic or despairing.ġ00 Boyfriends, published earlier this year in the US by Farrar Straus and Giroux imprint MCDxFSG, is a collection of short stories that ex- New York Times book critic Parul Sehgal described as a “hurricane of delirious, lonely, lewd tales.” The stories are mostly hilarious, sometimes sad, and often feel like being tickled and punched in the gut at the same time. How do you write about the pain of being alive without losing all of yourself? Brontez Purnell might have the answer. Photo credit for author photo: Stephanie Lister
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