Even as they blur distinctions between fiction and memoir, the daring, even challenging stories in What We Lost in the Fire stretch and expand notions of queer “identity.” Ricketts’ characters are messy. They have faults. They’re nobody’s role models. Throughout his fictions runs a dark, occasionally lacerating humor, a well-honed sense both of existential absurdity and of the harrowingly high stakes of everyday love and trouble. The eclectic geographies of the stories in What We Lost in the Fire—a Texas prison; southwestern Ohio; Rome, Italy; O‘ahu, Hawai‘i; San Francisco, New York; and still other, hybrid landscapes—are reflected in the rich, idiomatic voices of Ricketts’ characters, while the novella-length title story captures the nearly indescribable zeitgeist of queer life during the “plague years” in San Francisco. This richly varied collection of tales of class revenge and class solidarity; of studies in ennui, bitterness, and violence; of rambunctious satires and carefully-drawn realism; of love stories (and even a few hate stories) honors the distance traveled and the scars collected along the way. They’re not “feel good” stories; they’re “feel human” stories. Queer literary fiction has a new champion in this memorable collection. [SPRING 2021!]
| How to Read a Photograph | Cher Upon A Midnight Clear |
| Twenty Cigarettes in Nasiriyah | The Book of Singloids |
FourCats Press is an independent publisher specializing in literature in translation (primarily from Italian to English), LGBTQ and working-class literary fiction, nonfiction in the areas of LGBTQ and working-class studies, and paleontology/earth sciences.
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Blue, Too: More Writing By (for or about) Working-Class Queers |
Using both POD and standard print technologies, we publish “traditional” books and periodicals — the kind whose corners you can turn down and whose margins you can write in — for discerning readers.
We provide our authors with book and cover design as well as expert editing and proofreading.
| The Heterosexual & Homosexual Identities: The Normalization of Sexual Relationships | Paleocene by Mike Keesey (in Italian/in italiano) |
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Fossil News: The Journal of Avocational Paleontology, a quarterly, full-color magazine, is another FourCats Press project . Visit the Fossil News site for complete information about the magazine, including how to subscribe and how submit your work!
