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| August Clarke (photo: Asya Sagnak) |
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August Clarke is here and queer, etc. They have been published in PRISM international, Portland Review, and Eidolon, and in the Bury Your Gays and Unfettered Hexes anthologies. He was a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow in Young Adult Fiction and an Andre Norton Nebula Award, Locus Award, Dragon Award, and Pushcart nominee. He is the author of the series The Scapegracers, which he writes as H.A. Clarke. Metal from Heaven (Erewhon, October 22, 2024) is for fans of The Princess Bride and Gideon the Ninth, and is set in a glittering world transformed by industrial change and simmering class warfare.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
Pulp psychedelic revenge fantasy by way of stone butch bandit Disco Elysium.
On your nightstand now:
The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera and Lote by Shola von Reinhold, both fabulously gorgeous, knock-the-wind-out-of-you type books. I'm savoring them. Compound Fracture by Andrew Joseph White is next up.
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle for transgender reasons or The Queen of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner for mischief reasons. Huge influences on the way I think about fantasy writing; I would recommend reading them aloud.
Your top five authors:
Evil impossible question! At least right now, subject to change:
Samuel R. Delany
Ursula K. Le Guin
Kathy Acker
George Bataille
Junji Ito
Book you've faked reading:
Definitely the Grundrisse. I'm a Karl Marx guy; I will tell you to read Capital (at least volume one) and mean it, but man oh man. I am bad at wool equations. My eyes have moved over the pages, but was it reading? No.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih, which is a perfect novel--like a flawless execution of the form that is a novel, and the end is exhilarating. Also, Slug and Other Stories by Megan Milks is such a great, nasty, gnarly, lovely short story collection.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Sex Goblin by Lauren Cook. Red cover, red pages! Red!
Book you hid from your parents:
It's almost cliché at this point, but definitely Anne Rice's Sleeping Beauty Trilogy. I was a big Vampire Chronicles guy in high school, and I stumbled upon a copy. Tale as old as time.
Book that changed your life:
I have a lot of insufferable answers to this question, like A Thousand Plateaus by Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, Cruising Utopia by José Esteban Muñoz, and The Political Unconscious by Fredric Jameson, but honestly, I think reading and performing Shakespeare has changed my life more than anything. That's where all my language love comes from.
Favorite line from a book:
Right now, amid the compounding calamities imperialism inflicts on the world, I've been thinking a lot about this classic bit of Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower:
"All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
is Change.
God is Change."
Five books you'll never part with:
Right now:
The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Mitchell
The Female Man by Joanna Russ
Margery Kempe by Robert Gluck
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny or Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, both of which I entered expecting quick fun pulp and leaving fully awed and unbelievably moved and excited to talk about genre.