Summer Fun
Jeanne Thornton
ISBN: 9781641292382
Published: July 27, 2021
Pricing
Hardcover $27.00
eBook $14.99
More books by Jeanne Thornton
Jeanne Thornton
Description
From acclaimed author Jeanne Thornton, an epic, singular look at fandom, creativity, longing, and trans identity.
Gala, a young trans woman, works at a hostel in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. She is obsessed with the Get Happies, the quintessential 1960s Californian band, helmed by its resident genius, B----. Gala...
From acclaimed author Jeanne Thornton, an epic, singular look at fandom, creativity, longing, and trans identity.
Gala, a young trans woman, works at a hostel in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. She is obsessed with the Get Happies, the quintessential 1960s Californian band, helmed by its resident genius, B—-. Gala needs to know: Why did the band stop making music? Why did they never release their rumored album, Summer Fun?
And so she writes letters to B—- that shed light not only on the Get Happies, but paint an extraordinary portrait of Gala. The parallel narratives of B—- and Gala form a dialogue about creation—of music, identity, self, culture, and counterculture.
Summer Fun is a brilliant and magical work of trans literature that marks Thornton as one of our most exciting and original novelists.
Media
“I anticipated the release of Summer Fun for six years, and now that I finally got to read it, its characters and story will linger with me much longer than that. I suspect it will come to be considered the Pet Sounds of trans literature: a masterpiece that feels both astonishingly new and comfortingly familiar.”
—Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby
“There is no way to prepare for Summer Fun; we can only submit to Thornton's surreal, captivating and startlingly sui generis world. Summer Fun is a fully realized vision so strange and compelling that even in writing this blurb I still can't quite shake the sensation of having genuinely known these characters, if only for a short and magical while.”
—Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox
“A beautiful, mesmerizing volcano of a novel that elegantly vibrates with the intimate weight of decades. Thornton's prose is driving, joyous, and steeped with a grace reminiscent of Marilynne Robinson. It all builds to an ending that is no less than perfect. This book made me cry.”
—Casey Plett, author of Little Fish
“Jeanne Thornton is a sorceress of a writer and, like the ritual at the heart of this book, Summer Fun is a singular and compassionate act of imaginative magic. A feast of contradictions at once funny and painful, tender and scathing, patriotic and radical, Summer Fun contains generations; our country; a world.”
—Rachel Lyon, author of Self-Portrait with Boy
“In Summer Fun, Jeanne Thornton, that slow-burn superstar, has dropped a punk’s pop masterpiece—a compulsively readable novel that somehow also reinvigorates the form of the epistolary novel, dives into the deepest reflective waters of fandom, observes trans-cis relations with social-realist precision and generosity, and recovers the trans throughline that was always there. We are so lucky to live now, when we get to read this book.””
—Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl
“With intimacy and yearning, Thornton captures the intensity of fandom and self-discovery, of our relationships with art and each other, and the transcendent joy of truly being seen.”