Every True Pleasure

232 pp., 6.125 x 9.25

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-4680-0
Published: March 2019
E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-1-4696-4681-7
Published: February 2019
E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-5397-4
Published: February 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-4679-4
Published: March 2019

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Paperback $27.00
Hardcover $99.00
E-Book $14.99

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Some of North Carolina’s finest fiction and nonfiction writers come together in Every True Pleasure, including David Sedaris, Kelly Link, Allan Gurganus, Randall Kenan, and more. Within the volume—featuring writers who identify as gay, trans, bisexual, and straight—are stories and essays that view the full spectrum of contemporary life though an LGBTQ lens. These writers, all native or connected to North Carolina, show the multifaceted challenges and joys of LGBTQ life, including young love and gay panic, the minefield of religion, military service, having children with a surrogate, family rejection, finding one’s true gender, finding sex, and finding love. One of the only anthologies of its kind, Every True Pleasure speaks with insight and compassion about living LGBTQ in North Carolina and beyond.

Contributors include Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, Brian Blanchfield, Belle Boggs, Emily Chávez, Garrard Conley, John Pierre Craig, Diane Daniel, Allan Gurganus, Minrose Gwin, Aaron Gwyn, Wayne Johns, Randall Kenan, Kelly Link, Zelda Lockhart, Toni Newman, Michael Parker, Penelope Robbins, David Sedaris, Eric Tran, and Alyssa Wong.

About the Author

Wilton Barnhardt is author of several novels, including Lookaway, Lookaway, and a professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at North Carolina State University.
For more information about Wilton Barnhardt, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"A winning showcase of Southern queer lit."--Publishers Weekly

“The editor of this collection, Wilton Barnhardt, promises ‘a bunch of good things to read’ and delivers exactly that. If these writers weren’t connected by the natural fact of being members of, or sympathetic to, the LGBTQ community, they would be connected by their keenness of feeling and observation. What this book says is, ‘We are all kinds of people with all kinds of stories. In other words, we’re just like you.’”—Mark Childress, author of Crazy in Alabama and Georgia Bottoms

“UNC Press may be the first state press to produce an LGBTQ anthology from its own state’s writers, and what a tour de force it is, featuring the storytelling talent of North Carolina’s leading authors as well as up-and-coming writers. It’s a substantive collection, perfect for a survey of gay fiction and southern fiction, not to mention queer studies—but mostly it’s a page-turning journey through the wild ride of LGBTQ lives in contemporary America.”--Lori Ostlund, author of The Bigness of the World, and Anne Raeff, author of Winter Kept Us Warm, winners of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction