Today’s GalleyCrush is Brontez Purnell’s 100 Boyfriends, forthcoming from MCD x FSG Originals on February 2, 2021.
Perfect pitch: “An irreverent, sensitive, and inimitable look at gay dysfunction through the eyes of a cult hero.”
First lines: “I woke up alarmed. I didn’t know where I was at first. It was that feeling of waking up someplace foreign and being like, ‘What the fuck?!’ But then you look to the left and you’re like, ‘Oh, wait, that handsome guy.’”
Big blurb: “Each story in 100 Boyfriends is a minor eclipse: stunning in scope, technically blinding, and entirely miraculous. I laughed and I cried and I laughed until I cried—Brontez Purnell is a marvel.” —Bryan Washington
Book notes: Paperback, fiction, 192 pages.
Author bio: Brontez Purnell is a writer, musician, dancer, filmmaker, and performance artist. He is the author of a graphic novel, a novella, a children’s book, and the novel Since I Laid My Burden Down (Amethyst Editions, 2017). The recipient of a 2018 Whiting Award for Fiction, he was one of thirty-two authors featured in “Black Male Writers for Our Time” in T: The New York Time Style Magazine. Purnell is also the front man for the band the Younger Lovers, a cofounder of the experimental dance group the Brontez Purnell Dance Company, the creator of the renowned cult zine Fag School, and the director of several short films, music videos, and the documentary Unstoppable Feat: The Dances of Ed Mock. He lives in Oakland.
