What We’re Reading in November!
We’re excited to share that our November Book Club selection is Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s new novel The Freezer Door, forthcoming from Semiotext(e) on December 8, but available to Rumpus Book Club members in just a few weeks!
The Freezer Door records the ebb and flow of desire in daily life. Crossing through loneliness in search of communal pleasure in Seattle, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore exposes the failure and persistence of queer dreams, the hypocritical allure of gay male sexual culture, and the stranglehold of the suburban imagination over city life. Ferocious and tender, The Freezer Door offers a complex meditation on the trauma and possibility of searching for connection in a world that relentlessly enforces bland norms of gender, sexual, and social conformity while claiming to celebrate diversity.
“I really love Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s The Freezer Door. In a happy paradox common to great literature, it’s a book about not belonging that made me feel deeply less alone. I so admire its appetite to get down and dirty, to wield non sequitur with grace and power, to ponder the past while sticking with the present, to quest unceasingly. I stand deeply inspired and instructed by its great wit, candor, inventiveness, and majesty.” – Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts
“Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s The Freezer Door is the kind of book I read in excited bursts, then had to put down for a minute to absorb. I gasped, I laughed out loud on public transportation, I felt seen and changed and so relieved to live at the same time as this truth-telling genius. How lucky we all are to have this meditation on bodies, sex, friendship, cities, loss, loneliness, and, of course, pleasure!” – Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl
Subscribe to the Rumpus Book Club by October 15 to join us in reading The Freezer Door, culminating in an exclusive online discussion with author Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore about the book!