Novelist Andrea Lawlor in conversation with journalist Amelia Abraham, author of Queer Intentions: a (personal) journey though LGBTQ+ culture. A free event. Please register via eventbrite. Limited places. The Book: Transposing Virginia Woolfs Orlando to 90s San Francisco, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl offers a speculative history of early 90s identity politics during the heyday of ACT UP and Queer Nation. About: Its 1993 and Paul Polydoris tends bar at the only gay club in a university town thrumming with politics and partying. He studies queer theory, has a dyke best friend, makes zines, and is a flneur with a rich dating life. But Pauls also got a secret: hes a shapeshifter. Oscillating wildly from Riot Grrrl to leather cub, Womens Studies major to trade, Paul transforms his body at will in a series of adventures that take him from Iowa City to Boystown to Provincetown and finally to San Francisco a journey through the deep queer archives of struggle and pleasure. Andrea Lawlor (they/them) lives in Western Massachusetts and teaches writing at Mount Holyoke College. Lawlor is a fiction editor for Fence and the author of a chapbook, Position Papers (Factory Hollow Press, 2016). Theyre an incredibly exciting new voice and Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl has already developed a cult following in the US, with fans like Maggie Nelson, Eileen Myles and Garth Greenwell, among others. Amelia Abraham (b. 1991) is a journalist from London. Her main interest is LGBTQ identity politics, and she has written on or around this topic for the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent, the Sunday Times, the New Statesman, ES Magazine, VICE, i-D magazine and Dazed & Confused. She also writes about feminist issues, human-rights issues, health policy, arts and culture, and sex. Queer Intentions is her first book. Praise: 'I love this book, in all its ecstasy, wit, and hilarity. I laughed out loud in recognition and appreciation of Lawlors spot-on portrait of an era, scene, and soundtrack, the novels particular sluice of pleasures, fluids, and feelings. The liberatory rush of Lawlors writing is as rare as it is contagious, not to mention HOT. Paul is on fire, and an antihero for the ages.' - Maggie Nelson 'Fast-paced and cheeky, full of intellectual riffs, of observations so sharp they feel like gossip, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is a touchingly sweet-hearted and deeply cool book. Andrea Lawlor has written a magic story, showing us the real magic of our world in the process. If you like your humor supersmart and your theory full of camp and irony and heart, you wont be able to put this book down.' - Michelle Tea 'I am such a fan. Andrea Lawlors prose is restless, muscular and playful and uncannily able to zero in on the cultural details that make the world Paul is traveling through shimmer and pucker with truth. Stealth too. Its a tight satisfying masterpiece which I am very glad to hand you if you happen to love sex, clothes, literature which now includes the apparitional blessing of a new elastic genre (which Paul initiates) that seamlessly makes both whats out there and in here less lonely, less fixed and less fake.' - Eileen Myles 'Lawlor has a poets gift for catching quicksilver emotion in the amber of an image, a novelists gift for the epoch-defining detail, a mystics gift for inventing new language for rapture. Joyous and ever-changing, whip-smart and brilliantly perverse, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is quite simply one of the most excitingand one of the most funnovels of the decade.' - Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You 'Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is playful, sexy, smart, and like nothing else Ior youhave ever read before.' - Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties 'Lawlor successfully mixes pop culture, gender theory, and smut, but the great achievement here is that Paul is no mere symbol but a vibrantly yearning being, like everybody else, only more so. - New Yorker 'Im loving Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor. Its pulling at my little queer midwestern heartstrings to read magical Paul navigate desire and friendship in his body that he can change into whatever shape or sex he wants.' - Danez Smith, author of Don't Call Us Dead 'Its not hard to see why Lawlors been heralded at the forefront of trans literature. This is an original addition to the trans fiction canon.' - Dazed and Confused

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