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Book Of The Month: Let's Get Back To The Party

Book Of The Month. At PrideParade.net News , Washington, DC, Washington, DC. United states.

Saturday January 1 2022, 12:00am until January 31 2022, 11:59pm

Book Of The Month: Let's Get Back To The Party

January 2022

Zak Salih

Millennial queers exist in a kind of crossroads of gay history: many are too young to fully grapple with the magnitude of AIDS, some are too old to appreciate the social-media-influenced openness of Gen Z. It's at this crossroads that Salih's stirring ode to the many faces of queerness exists. It centers on two former friends, Sebastian and Oscar, who reconnect at a wedding, just as marriage equality has become the law of the land, and who both feel adrift in the constantly changing gay landscape. What unfolds is an intimate saga that brims with necessary conversations about cultural identity. 

It is 2015, weeks after the Supreme Court marriage equality ruling, and all Sebastian Mote wants is to settle down. A high school art history teacher, newly single and desperately lonely, he envies his queer students their freedom to live openly the youth he lost to fear and shame.

When he runs into his childhood friend Oscar Burnham at a wedding in Washington, D.C., he can’t help but see it as a second chance. Now thirty-five, the men haven’t seen each other in more than a decade. But Oscar has no interest in their shared history, nor in the sense of be­longing Sebastian craves. Instead, he’s outraged by what he sees as the death of gay culture: bars overrun with bachelorette parties, friends cou­pling off and having babies. For Oscar, confor­mity isn’t peace, it’s surrender.

 

 

While Oscar and Sebastian struggle to find their place in a rapidly changing world, each is drawn into a cross-generational friendship that treads the line between envy and obsession: Se­bastian with one of his students, Oscar with an older icon of the AIDS era. And as they collide again and again, both men must reckon not just with one another but with themselves.

Provocative, moving, and rich with sharply drawn characters, Let’s Get Back to the Party in­troduces an exciting and contemporary new talent.

A Most-Anticipated Book of 2021: BuzzFeed * The Millions Cosmopolitan Electric Literature * LGBTQ Reads * Paperback Paris
One of Advocate's “22 LGBTQ+ Books You Absolutely Need to Read This Year”

“An intimate saga that brims with necessary conversations about cultural identity.”​ —O, The Oprah Magazine, “32 LGBTQ Books That Will Change the Literary Landscape in 2021”

Apple Books | Amazon