The Call-Out
A Novel in Rhyme
Published on 25. October 2022
192 pages
978-1-64421-234-9 (ISBN)
Description
A fast-paced, debut tragicomedy of manners written in verse about queer (mostly trans) women that is funny, literary, philosophical, witty, sometimes bitchy and sometimes heartbreaking.
Anvi, Kate, Bette, Keiko, Gaia, and Day are six queer, mostly trans women surviving and thriving in Brooklyn. Visiting all the fixtures of fashionable 21st century queer society-picnics, literary readings, health conferences, drag shows, punk houses, community accountability processes, Grindr hookups-The Call-Out also engages with pressing questions around economic precarity, sexual consent, racism in queer spaces, and feminist theory, in the service of asking what it takes to build, or destroy, a marginalized community.
A novel written in verse, The Call-Out recalls the Russian literary classic Eugene Onegin, but instead of 19th century Russian aristocrats crudely solved their disagreements with pistols, the participants in this rhyming drama have developed a more refined weapon, the online call-out, a cancel-culture staple. In this passionate tangle of modern relationships, where a barbed tweet can be as dangerous as the narrator's bon-mots, Cat Fitzpatrick has fashioned a modern novel of manners that gives readers access to a vibrant cultural underground.
Anvi, Kate, Bette, Keiko, Gaia, and Day are six queer, mostly trans women surviving and thriving in Brooklyn. Visiting all the fixtures of fashionable 21st century queer society-picnics, literary readings, health conferences, drag shows, punk houses, community accountability processes, Grindr hookups-The Call-Out also engages with pressing questions around economic precarity, sexual consent, racism in queer spaces, and feminist theory, in the service of asking what it takes to build, or destroy, a marginalized community.
A novel written in verse, The Call-Out recalls the Russian literary classic Eugene Onegin, but instead of 19th century Russian aristocrats crudely solved their disagreements with pistols, the participants in this rhyming drama have developed a more refined weapon, the online call-out, a cancel-culture staple. In this passionate tangle of modern relationships, where a barbed tweet can be as dangerous as the narrator's bon-mots, Cat Fitzpatrick has fashioned a modern novel of manners that gives readers access to a vibrant cultural underground.
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CAT FITZPATRICK's debut novel, The Call-Out (Seven Stories Press, 2022), was awarded the 2023 Lambda Award for Transgender Fiction. She is the author of the poetry collection Glamourpuss (Topside Press, 2016), and the co-editor of the anthology Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction & Fantasy from Transgender Writers, which won the ALA Stonewall Award for Literature. Fitzpatrick is the first trans woman Director of the Women's and Gender Studies program at Rutgers University-Newark, and she also serves as the Editrix at LittlePuss Press. The Dinner Party (Seven Stories Press, 2026) is her second novel in verse.
