Realistic Fiction
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"Outrageously funny."
--Paul Harding
"There is nobody doing it like Anton."
--Tuck Woodstock
Finally, a book for men!
Have you ever engaged in totally normal male behavior like:
Stealing porn magazines?
Hooking up with guys on Grindr?
Attempting to work in an open-pit mine despite having no relevant job experience?
Crossdressing as a woman?
Attending Gnostic Mass?
Running for government office?
Then this is a book for you!
It is definitely not a deeply felt collection of transsexual short stories, engaged in dissident metaphysical investigation of the normative tenets of gender in our society! Bro, how could you say that? It is very dramatic and exciting, yes, but it is not metaphysical at all. In fact, it is Realistic Fiction.
As if Charlie Chaplin re-wrote the works of Kafka, and he was a Russian trans man, Anton Solomonik brings a funny, heartbreaking, and startlingly unique new voice to contemporary short fiction.
About this Author
Anton Solomonik is a writer and illustrator living in Brooklyn, NY. He's the co-host of the World Transsexual Forum, an open mic series for trans writers. His work has been described as "whimsical, yet heavy-handed."
Reviews
"Anton Solomonik's stories are mordant, caustic, unyielding and outrageously funny. As they sound the endless ad absurdum of the human condition - human selves inside their given human bodies, like either of 'em or not - and as they unceremoniously toss every stripe of piety, conformism, and posturing straight into the acid bath - they reverberate with a brilliant and steadfast, backhanded humanism. That is to say, Realistic Fiction is a grand and electrifying read."
--Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Tinkers
"Stellar ... Solomonik spins fictions that feel like jokes before you realize you are devastated by them."
--The Rumpus
"Blunt and often hilarious ... remakes the mundane world ... Solomonik's trans stories are not a plea for acceptance--they are bold and bizarre and tender and confrontational. They might make you squirm and will definitely make you laugh."
--Xtra
"Witty, insightful, and lots of fun, these eleven stories probe the vitality and vibrancy of the trans community."
--Bay Area Reporter
"Provocative ... Solomonik slips in plentiful philosophical musings and highbrow wit without taking himself too seriously. [Fans of] punchy short fiction will enjoy this."
--Publishers Weekly
"Lends insight into the alienation of being forced into socially acceptable roles: as men, as sons, as citizens. Readers with a love for messy, complicated characters will enjoy this collection."
--Library Journal
"Solomonik has created an entire universe out of his collection of eleven queer punk short stories where no small number of too-smart-for-their-own-good pseudo-intellectuals and well-intended weirdos hatch haphazard plots on the regular, and even the most mundane tasks take on life-changing significance."
--Scout
"What does it mean to be understood? My heart overflows at this long-awaited story collection, which blends Sonic the Hedgehog aesthetics with the exacting interior investigations of a trans Thomas Mann, and which answers that question through unforgettable narrators who passionately strive to become less than they are, and who fail."
--Jeanne Thornton, Lambda Award-winning author of Summer Fun and A/S/L
"If you like your prose freaky, your filth ambivalent, your millennial transes confused, and your gloomy irony served with a soupçon of glamorous ideological danger, I have the book for you. Anton Solomonik's Realistic Fiction is irresistible. I'm a fan!
--Andrea Lawlor, Whiting Award-winning author of Paul Takes The Form of a Mortal Girl
"There is nobody doing it like Anton. I cannot wait to hear what people make of this collection of freaks (deeply complimentary)."
--Tuck Woodstock, host of Gender Reveal
"Delights with disorienting humor, fascinating characters, and the enthusiastic plumbing of masculinity's many mysteries, from local politics to cross-dressing to Magic: The Gathering. Low affect yet high-fidelity, Fiction is giving Thomas Bernhard meets Dennis Cooper meets, I wanna say, Robert Walser? (While we're comparing, it's rare to find short stories as tightly moving as the Borgesian "August, 1962.")
--Davey Davis, author of X
"Anton Solomonik brings us into an uncanny valley of human interaction spiked with gender, philosophy, sex, and death; with the purity of unpaid labor in Boron mines and plenty of anxious self-reflection. It's reality broken up and viewed through a post-internet refraction. Finally, trans fiction as strange as trans life."
--Calvin Gimpelevich, Lambda Award-nominated author of Invasions
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