The Aesop Queer Library, Paris Edition

One summer evening in the town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on a bridge, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond. The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which our lives are changed by the most unexpected of people. When Hai takes a job at a diner to support himself and Grazina, his fellow workers become the family he didn’t expect to find. United by desperation and circumstance, and existing on the fringes of society, together they bear witness to each other’s survival.

New York simmers with heat and unrest as Wyeth, a painter, finds himself at an impasse in his own work. After attending a dubious show put on by a collective of careerist artists, he retreats to a bar in the West Village where he meets Keating, a former seminarian. Over the long summer, as the two get to know each another, they talk and argue about God, sex, and art. Meanwhile, at his job working for an art restorer, Wyeth begins to investigate the life and career of a forgotten, minor black artist. His search yields potential answers to questions that Wyeth is only now beginning to ask about what it means to be a black artist making black art amid the mess and beauty of life itself.

A BROTHER. A SISTER. A LOT OF EMOTION IN ONE APARTMENT. This is the story of Greta and Valdin: twenty-something brother and sister with a near-unpronounceable surname, a sprawling Maori-Russian-Catalonian family and questionable taste in partners. While Valdin can’t seem to get over his ex-boyfriend who fled the country, Greta has an unrequited crush on fellow English tutor Holly, who uses her for admin support. But all hope is not lost for these lovelorn siblings. Through the misadventures and mess of modern adulthood, at least they still have each other — unless drama gets in the way. From bad dates to family feuds and embarrassing karaoke nights, this acclaimed bestseller from New Zealand is a fresh, heartwarming and hilarious story about the trials and tribulations of love in its many forms.

Before the world premiere of Juno Elliot Page was on the edge of self-discovery. But with Juno's massive success and his dreams coming true, Elliot found himself trapped by the spotlight and the pressure to perform was suffocating him. Until enough was enough. From chasing down secret love affairs to battling body image and working through his difficult childhood, Pageboy is a beautiful, intimate book about searching for ourselves and our place in the world.

To complain is an intimate, dangerous act. Whether it’s speaking up about racism in the workplace or taking a stand against sexual harassment at university, the act of complaining to an institution can leave you isolated and undermined, all while the original injustice remains unresolved. Time and time again, we see these unanswered complaints compound to disastrous effect. In No is Not a Lonely Utterance, Sara Ahmed dissects the anatomy of a complaint, revealing how institutions create hostile environments that stigmatize complainers, and charts a way we can listen to grievances with ‘feminist ears’: going beyond mere validation and seeking instead to address the root causes of injustice and inequality. Weaving together testimonies from various walks of life, Ahmed shows us what we learn about the ways institutions exercise their power when complaints are raised, and indeed what we learn about our capacity to collectivize and create social bonds through complaint. In doing so, she inspires us to create better environments for our life’s work.

This autofiction follows the journey of an anti-hero through the San Francisco Bay Area and 2000s America. He is neither exemplary nor perfect, far from being conventional, and that is precisely why we want to follow him. Like its author, Brontez Purnell, our protagonist is Black, a punk, living on the edge, overweight, gay, HIV-positive, and addicted to excess—and none of this is a tragedy. His devastating humour destroys any attempt at guilt-tripping, strips away the stigmas of LGBTQI+ experiences, shatters any form of normalisation and blows reason to smithereens. With his singular, extreme, radical and queer journey, Brontez Purnell transforms the tragic into the magical.

This is the story of a girl who doesn’t agree with the social order. Are our faces mere images, shop fronts? Has our attention become a commodity, like land? Has something broken inside us? From childhood to writing, via a mysterious bar, an abandoned house, a building full of cults, or the summit of a mountain, the narrator takes us on an odyssey dotted with Homeric mirrors and the songs of bards that show us the book in the making. Les Forces takes up and subverts the motifs of the coming-of-age novel.

As a strange sandstorm engulfs the country, two men cross paths at Aunt Fátima’s house. In Jerusalem, a city like a labyrinth, people seduce one another every night, spinning tales of jinns, lions and knights. In this demonic season, Gabriel and Isaac love each other, lose each other and find each other again, then decide, despite the sand and the checkpoints, to go on holiday… But isn’t that a mad idea in a fragmented country? From Jerusalem to Jericho, then to the mysterious village where people forget to die, all the way to Solomon’s Pools, it is a romantic adventure, a quest for light and freedom…

Fatal*e and Arthure Rimbaud realise that language has run its course. There is no possible response, as there is no longer any hook. So, they enter into resistance. Fatal*e is a contemporary epic featuring heroines who are fatal to their condition and their absolute. Fatal to their beauty. It speaks of love and of everything that inevitably falls, in the hope of reinventing itself afterwards.

In *The Scent of Wet Stones*, Léa Rivière weaves worlds where one can never quite tell whether they have always been there or are on the verge of coming into being. She crafts stories that blend traditions, science fiction, trans ecologies, relationships with ancestors, and the interdependence of villages. From poetic dialogue that flirts with performance to a Wittigian epic, Léa Rivière reveals a precise and multifaceted writing style, always in the service of what she calls ‘narrative work’: a way of facilitating the emergence of stories necessary to the lives of those who occupy the interstices of hegemonic narratives.

At seventy-four, Barrington Jedidiah Walker is more than ever the charmer Carmel first met in Antigua, before moving to London with him. A dandy, a bon vivant and a master of conversation, this Caribbean gentleman is entirely self-taught. He quotes William Shakespeare and James Baldwin and shares his many views on politics, art and his family roots. Carmel and Barry have been married for half a century, and Barry is still deeply in love with his childhood sweetheart. But it isn’t Carmel. Morris Courtney de la Roux’s muscular physique has driven Barry wild for sixty years. His soulmate guesses his every thought; his mouth finishes his sentences. All his life, Morris has begged Barry to come and live with him, to no avail. Why? Fear of not having the strength to face the social consequences of coming out so late in life? Respect for a devout wife who believes him to be a womaniser? As he approaches the twilight of his life, Barry feels that he is about to miss his last chance to finally be happy…

“It is quite simply the sequel to To the friend who did not save my life: exactly what I said I would never do. A year and a half lies between these two books. A time of giving up writing, a time of experience. We find the same characters: Hervé Guibert, a writer with AIDS, his loved ones, the community of patients and their carers. Claudette Dumouchel, a young doctor aged twenty-eight, enters the scene. A strange relationship develops with every examination between this very beautiful woman and the narrator. A relationship perhaps close to love—one never knows. A new drug has also appeared, DDI: very difficult to obtain and uncertain, still at the experimental stage. In the United States, it has already killed three hundred people who had obtained it on the black market and used it without knowing the doses, without medical supervision, blindly, desperately. In France, for the time being, it is being dispensed to patients who are at the end of their tether, under a protocol described by doctors as ‘compassionate’. It is this new drug that has enabled me to overcome my exhaustion, and to write.”

This spellbinding novel traces the journey of a queer person between a flat overrun with plants and the world of Parisian queer nightlife. An encounter offers them a window into another feminist culture—that of a Northern European country more open to trans issues. This opens up the possibility of an alternative reality, where the imagination is capable of influencing and reshaping the real world. Somewhere between autofiction and magical realism, Camille Cornu explores, in a rich and masterful style, the transcendence of binaries—both of gender and those between human and non-human. An unclassifiable, deeply contemporary book, in which escaping norms and categories becomes a way of opening up revolutionary horizons at the limits of the body.

A young queer man of Syrian origin living in New York, the main character in *The Thirty Names of the Night* struggles to find his place within a community that does not understand him. Uncomfortable in his own skin, he lives in seclusion with his ailing grandmother, whom he cares for tenderly. He only feels truly free when slipping away into the streets of Little Syria, a Manhattan neighbourhood now overtaken by the world of finance, where he paints murals of birds. One night, in the recesses of an abandoned building, he finds a notebook that will turn his life upside down. It is the diary of Laila Z, a Syrian artist who emigrated to the United States and devoted her career to painting the birds of North America. As he turns the pages, the narrator discovers how closely Laila Z’s past is linked to that of his own family, particularly that of his mother, an ornithologist who died five years earlier in a suspicious fire...

I am the water that carries Clara’s tears. The mist of memory on the windowpane as night falls. I am the snowflakes settling on their tongues, stretched high towards the sky, in the crystalline winter. I am the stream where they walked barefoot when summer came. I am the moisture between their entwined thighs and at their fingertips; I am the torrent of their liquid souls, and the saliva of the words they whispered softly. I am the cloud, the wave after the thunder that drowns the whole valley in a crash of lightning; I am their rumbling joy, I am their anger. Someone must hear me; I have a story to tell, yet only the wind answers me. The wind has held onto the memory of Meni. In this spellbinding novel, Wendy Delorme immerses us in two love stories that echo across two different eras, allowing us to hear the memory of marginalised lives, in a narrative where the elements—water, wind, trees and stones—become characters in their own right.

How can we talk about friendship, and describe this ‘chosen family’ that allows us to invent new ways of living? The narrator sets out in search of her past and explores the multitude of connections at work in her life. Interwoven with previously unpublished photographs from queer archives, this powerful and sensitive book is a novel about friendship, an attempt to articulate the political power of this sentiment and its capacity for reinvention. An excessive desire for friendship raises the broader question of kinship: how might one construct an alternative genealogy, rescuing from oblivion the lives that mainstream memory disregards, in order to become part of a narrative that is no longer merely intimate but collective? For the inquiry undertaken here is also intended for others: “I tell myself that if we’re going to invent new family histories, we might as well share them.”