REPRINTS + DIGITAL fiction
LOTE
shola von reinhold
SHOLA VON REINHOLD
“LOTE recruits literary innovation into the project of examining social marginalisation, queerness, class, Black Modernisms and archival absences. A critically important and hugely original debut.”—ISABEL WAIDNER, author of We Are Made of Diamond Stuff and Gaudy Bauble “LOTE is one of the most compelling works in trans fiction I’ve read in a long time.” —MCKENZIE WARK, author of Philosophy for Spiders: On the Low Theory of Kathy Acker “The contemporary moment for Black life in the United States needs this decadent Black and queer meditation on beauty and aesthetics.”—MARQUIS BEY, author of Black Trans Feminism
Solitary Mathilda has long harbored a conflicted enchantment bordering on rapture with the “Bright Young Things,” the Bloomsbury Group, and their contemporaries of the ’20s and ’30s, and throughout her life her attempts at reinvention have mirrored their extravagance and artfulness. After discovering a photograph of the forgotten Black modernist poet Hermia Druitt, who ran in the same circles as the Bright Young Things, Mathilda becomes transfixed and resolves to learn as much as she can about the mysterious figure. Her search brings her to a peculiar artists’ residency in Dun, a small European town Hermia was known to have lived in during the ’30s. The artists’ residency throws her deeper into a lattice of secrets and secret societies that takes hold of her aesthetic imagination. From champagne theft and Black Modernisms to art sabotage, alchemy, and a lotus-eating proto-luxury communist cult, Mathilda’s “Escapes” through modes of aesthetic expression lead her to question the convoluted ways truth is made and obscured.
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“Ingenious; irresistible; a dazzling first novel.” Naomi Booth, author of Sealed and The Lost Art of Sinking
June 472 pages paper, 978-1-4780-1872-8 $19.95tr Rights:: North America, excluding Canada
Photo by David Chukwujekwu
“LOTE is a decadent celebration of portraiture, queer history and Blackness, and a bitingly funny work of fiction. In this book, von Reinhold provides us with a mischievous new work of aesthetic theory, as well as a glorious and gorgeously imagined fictional world. Ingenious; irresistible; a dazzling first novel.”—NAOMI BOOTH, author of Sealed and The Lost Art of Sinking
Shola von Reinhold is a writer born and based in Glasgow.
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