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Personal Attention Roleplay

$9.99 – $18.95

Available in paperback (for customers living in Canada and in the US), PDF (worldwide), and EPUB (worldwide).

by H Felix Chau Bradley

Fall 2021

Shortlisted for the TWUC Danuta Gleed Literary Award
Shortlisted for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize

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.

H Felix Chau Bradley is a writer and musician living in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). Their writing has appeared in carte blanche, Cosmonauts Avenue, Maisonneuve Magazine, the Montreal Review of Books, and elsewhere. They are the author of Automatic Object Lessons, a poetry chapbook. They are the Fiction Editor for This Magazine, and the host of Strange Futures, a speculative fiction book club. Personal Attention Roleplay is their first book.

Please note: the author of this book has generously authorized the publisher to keep selling remaining print copies under their previous name. However, we would appreciate you using their correct, current name (H Felix Chau Bradley) in any mentions, shares, tags, and so on. Thanks again! 

SKU: N/A Category:

Author: H Felix Chau Bradley

ISBN: 9781777485214 (print)

ISBN: 9781777485221 (EPUB)

ISBN: 9781777485283 (PDF)

Cover art by Marigold Santos

Cover design by LOKI

  • Paperback, 216 pages
  • Printed in Quebec
  • Publication date: November 23, 2021

“Chau Bradley comes off as a self-aware author, and their work reflects that: many stories feature characters in a blunt, honest light, showing the depths of isolation and mental health issues in an intimate way.”
—Billie Gagné-LeBel, Montreal Review of Books

“Chau Bradley’s writing is shimmering, beautiful, and funny. There’s no question they’re a new writer to watch. I loved this book.”
—Casey Plett, Chatelaine

“Clever and complex.”
—Angela Mazza, Maisonneuve

“[This collection’s] stories are deft even when they are wild … and the dialogue is so keen, so perfectly pitched.”
—S. Bear Bergman, Xtra

“Queer maverick H Felix Chau Bradley’s adventurous debut is what the broken world needs right now … Personal Attention Roleplay is a power to the people collection—daring, propulsive, and fun.”
—Jennifer Tseng, author of Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness

“With an enticing mix of sincerity, irony, and wit, the stories in Chau Bradley’s Personal Attention Roleplay offer brilliant portrayals of deliciously awkward interactions and isolations. No image, no metaphor, is out of place in the mouth of its speaker, and each speaker is a sympathetic (even while, at times, flawed) representation of their generation, community, and culture. The effect is an effortlessly cool book that gifts a welcome shakeup to Asian Canadian lit. To say I’m inspired is an understatement.”
—Jenny Heijun Wills, author of Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related: A Memoir

”Chau Bradley’s first collection is supremely ordinary but that’s its magic, their stories are deeply experiential and in their familiar excess I felt transported into an array of different bodies and moments that make up this time and each ending releasing me into the next set of conditions that puzzle out the almost sci fi specificity of the unexpected world ‘this’ contemporary is. I felt compelled to keep reading being held by an impulse to not be alone today or tonight. Personal Attention Roleplay is a canny and companionable book, actually sweet.”
—Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea Girls

Format

EPUB, PDF, Print
Availability

Print books available for purchase to addresses in Canada and the United States. EPUBs and PDFs available worldwide.

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