Jackie Ess is a writer, cultural mischief-maker, and minor internet celebrity. A co-founder of the Bay Area Trans Writers Workshop, her work can be found in Heavy Feather Review, the Zahir, the New Inquiry, Vetch, and the anthology We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics. Darryl is her first novel. Find her on Twitter @jackie_ess.
“Underneath the sharp satire and hilarious sexual irreverence this
is a deadly serious book: a brilliant novel of a seeker, like The
Pilgrim’s Progress refracted by queer internet culture.” —Torrey
Peters, author of Detransition, Baby: a novel“Jackie Ess writes the
feeling of being on the edge of a revelation better than anybody
I’ve ever read. In her novel, the titular character, Darryl,
narrates his adventure into the cuckolding lifestyle in short blog
posts full of introspection and the sort of questions that lead you
to realize that the life you have isn’t the one you want. It
reminded me of nothing so much as my own early fumbling toward
transition. Alternately meditative and razor-sharp, absurd and
painfully real; Darryl probably isn’t the transgender novel you
thought you wanted – but it is the one this moment calls for.” —
Ben Lenk, digital production engineer, Digital Media, NPR“This is a
brilliant and hilarious satire of selfhood and desire that tracks
the tangled mess of identity formation in a world saturated with
definitions… Ess captures the thorny overlaps between male
friendship, love, competition, and lust to create an unforgettable
portrait of the men who know too easily how to be men and the men
desperate to figure it out.” — Alex McElroy, Buzzfeed
News“Darryl introduces a genuinely novel figure: a chaos-agent who
is at every turn a loser, on whom the world continually puts one
over, but whose very passivity is explosively charged.”
— Dominic Fox, Review31“Reading Darryl is certainly somewhat
of an acid trip, walking through internet culture reflected back in
ways that vacillate between cruelty and tenderness." — Grace
Byron, Observer
“It brushes up against Dennis Cooper’s “The Sluts,” one of the most
daring unreliably narrated novels in recent history, making that
world of hustlers and the men who review them on messageboards
close enough to touch. This novel uses a deadpan, reasonable,
low-key tone to explore utterly unhinged concepts, wholly deranged
rationales, in a dizzying whirl of subcultures and ideals and
catastrophic decisions and their consequences.” — Kyle
Lukoff, Lambda Literary
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