Double Detroit Book Launch

Please join Metonymy Press authors H. Felix Chau Bradley and Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch for the double launch of their latest books. The two will be joined by guest readers Pwaangulongii Dauod & George Abraham.

PERSONAL ATTENTION ROLEPLAY

A young gymnast crushes on an older, more talented teammate while contending with her overworked mother. A newly queer twenty-something juggles two intimate relationships—with a slippery anarchist lover and an idiosyncratic meals-on-wheels recipient. A queer metal band’s summer tour unravels amid the sticky heat of the Northeastern US. A codependent listicle writer becomes obsessed with a Japanese ASMR channel.

The stories in Personal Attention Roleplay are propelled by queer loneliness, mixed-race confusion, late capitalist despondency, and the pitfalls of intimacy. Taking place in Montreal, Toronto, and elsewhere, they feature young Asian misfits struggling with the desire to see themselves reflected—in their surroundings, in others, online. Chau Bradley’s precise language and investigation of our more troubling motivations stand out in this wryly funny debut, through stories that hint at the uncanny while remaining grounded in the everyday.

*Shortlisted for the 2021 TWUC Danuta Gleed Literary Award and the eighth annual Kobo Emerging Writer Prize.*

THE GOOD ARABS

This collection of poetry swings from post-explosion Beirut to a Parc-Extension balcony in summer–with verse and prose poems that ground the reader in place, language, and the body. Peeling and rinsing radishes. Dancing as a pre-teen to Nancy Ajram. Being drenched in stares on the city bus. The collection is an interlocking and rich offering of the speaker’s communities, geographical surroundings both expansive and precise, and family both biological and chosen.

The Good Arabs gifts the reader with insight into cycles and repetition in ourselves and our broken nations. This genre-defying collection maps Arab and trans identity through the immensity of experience felt in one body, the sorrow of citizens let down by their countries, and the garbage crisis in Lebanon. Ultimately, it shows how we might love amid dismay, adore the pungent and the ugly, and exist in our multiplicity across spaces.

**Honorable Mention for the 2022 Arab American Book Award and Jury Selection for the Grand Prix du livre de Montreal**

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

H. Felix Chau Bradley is a writer and musician living in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). They are the author of Automatic Object Lessons, a poetry chapbook, the Fiction Editor for This Magazine, and the host of Strange Futures, a speculative fiction book club. Personal Attention Roleplay is their first book. They are also an acquisitions editor at Metonymy Press.

Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch is a writer living in Tiohtià:ke. Their work has appeared in The Best Canadian Poetry 2018 anthology, The New Quarterly, Arc Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. They were longlisted for the CBC poetry prize in 2019. Their book, knot body (2020), published by Metatron Press, was shortlisted for the QWF Concordia First Book Award, and their second book, The Good Arabs, was published by Metonymy Press in September 2021. They are the non-fiction editor at The Puritan. They are also an acquisitions editor at Metonymy Press.

ABOUT THE GUEST READERS:

George Abraham (they/هو) is a Palestinian American poet. Their debut poetry collection Birthright (Button Poetry, 2020) won the Arab American Book Award and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. They are a board member for the Radius of Arab American Writers, and a recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, The Arab American National Museum, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, National Performance Network, and more. They are currently co-editing a Palestinian global anglophone poetry anthology with Noor Hindi (Haymarket Books, 2024) and are a Litowitz MFA+MA student at Northwestern University.

Pwaangulongii Dauod is a Nigerian writer whose essay, “Africa’s Future Has No Space for Stupid Black Men” (Granta), sparked a national conversation about queer issues in Nigeria and led to threats to his life. He is an Artist Protection Fund Fellow in residence at Wayne State University’s Department of English and City of Asylum/Detroit. His writing has appeared in Granta, LitHub, Johannesburg Review of Books, and elsewhere. He studied with celebrated authors Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Binyavanga Wainaina and holds an MFA from University of Virginia. He is the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, an O’Brien Fellowship at the McGill Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism, and a Gerald Kraak Award. He was a finalist for the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Manuscript Prize and Woke Africa Magazine named him One of the Best African Writers of the New Generation.

**

27th Letter Books is located at 3546 Michigan Avenue in Detroit. For more info about the venue, visit 27thletterbooks.com. Attendees are asked to wear masks at the event.