So Many Ways to Sleep Badly - Softcover

Bernstein Sycamore, Mattilda

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0872864685 ISBN 13: 9780872864689

Publisher: City Lights Publishers, 2008

Synopsis

“Sycamore kicks mainstream literature in the teeth.”—The San Francisco Bay Guardian

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's exhilarating novel is about struggling to find hope in the ruins of everyday San Francisco—battling roaches, Bikram Yoga, chronically bad sex, NPR, internet cruising, tweakers, the cops, $100 bills, chronic pain, the gay vote, vegan restaurants and incest, with the help of air-raid sirens, herbal medicine, late-night epiphanies, sea lions and sleeping pills. So Many Ways to Sleep Badly unveils a gender-bending queer world where nothing flows smoothly, except for those sudden moments when everything becomes lighter or brighter or easier to imagine.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the gender-bending author of the highly praised novel Pulling Taffy and the editor of the anthology Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity. Sycamore writes regularly for a variety of publications, including Bitch, Utne Reader, AlterNet, Make/Shift and MaximumRocknRoll.

About this title

About the Author

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the author of the novel Pulling Taffy, and the editor of four nonfiction anthologies, including Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity and That's Revoling! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation. Sycamore writes regularly for a variety of publications, including Bitch, Utne Reader, AlterNet, Make/Shift, and Maximumrocknroll. She lives in San Francisco.

Review

"So Many Ways to Sleep Badly is a perfectly tidy mess, a Sex in the Other City—only these sexual escapades and flailing urges are truly transgressive and flamboyantly hilarious at every turn. Sycamore deftly skewers a landscape that's been completely sacked by mindless consumerism and unchecked gentrification, whether it's a Whole Foods customer whining, "Which fish is the least fishy?" or an earnest yoga practitioner bragging about opening a factory in China. And hallelujah: this refreshingly frenetic and innovative second novel is unabashedly political, but without being formulaic or reductive. It is a book that has done nothing less than invent its own language—and I promise it'll still be singing to you long after you close your eyes at night."—T Cooper, author of Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes and Some of the Parts

"Mattilda's brilliance makes stream-of-consciousness a lifestyle, a state-of-consciousness. This is an entire lived life's worth of heartshaking honesty, arch observation, searing vulnerabilty and craving and seeking, all in one breathtakingly poetic (and hilarious) book."—Michelle Tea, author of Valencia and Rose of No Man's Land

"Like the best writers that have come before—Wojnarowicz, Lou Reed, Burroughs—Sycamore has boiled life and times down to a resin that you could almost grind, cut up and snort. There is no one else on this planet that could write this book. Dare I say it's a classic? Yes, and I dare you to read it."—Jake Shears of Scissor Sisters

"Reading a chapter of this amazing book is like when someone throws you into the deep end and you don't know how to swim. You feel like you're gonna drown, like how am I going to do this? You can't breathe and you flail and start to sink, you’re freezing but then you feel brisk then actually kind of exhilarated and then you are breathing not mere air but something rich and sweet and fluid, a thing a whole lot like the inside of your body. You breathe in this new element—this frantic, fluid prose—and read like you have never read before."—Rebecca Brown, author of The End of Youth and The Last Time I Saw You

"In 1955, City Lights published Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, an attack on the conformity and the alienation of that era. Now here’s another great paean to a counterculture of hustlers, junkies and visionary angels to wash the taste of the Bush years out of our mouths. Instead of incantation, it is a hooker’s pillowbook that describes a community of physical uproar and activism based on doubt. What a tonic this books is—that people fuck with such conviction and attention to detail! It’s like a treasure map of a San Francisco with orgasms instead of doubloons. . . . The map is the body, volcanic, weary, sick, fragile and tough."—Robert Glück, author of Jack the Modernist and Denny Smith Stories

Edition details

• Publisher: City Lights Publishers
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0872864685
• ISBN 13: 9780872864689
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 246