Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Fiction
“Neotenica is sentence-level sexy and surprisingly funny, my kind of thriller. Joon Oluchi Lee cracks open a window onto a very familiar Bay Area, yet one I’ve never before seen in fiction. I am obsessed with this book! ”
“It’s artfully constructed, kinky, poetic, intellectually rich—kind of New Narrative updated, with keen thinking and nimble point-of-view problematics overlaying the lucid erotic dance.”
Neotenica
… is a novel of encounters: casual sex and sex with extra meaning, arranged-marriage dates, old girlfriends, cops, rowdy teenagers, a mother, brothers, lawyers, a lost best friend, a Sapphic flirtation, a rival, a child, and two important dogs, Marilyn and Bettie. At the center of it all are two people: Young Ae, a Korean-born ballet dancer turned Ph.D. student in literature, and her husband, a Korean-American male who has an interior femininity which is neither transgender nor homosexual, but a strong, visceral femininity nonetheless. The sentences that make up the novel are like drawings made with a cheap blue ball-point pen on thick expensive paper. The feel of frail metal pressing powdery ink into plush page; the accrued elaborateness of designs pulled from daydreams, to-do-lists, free-associations, sudden total recall, form a decadent swollenness that swings away from any real time and place and creates a magnetic shell of skin for the people around whom the story is told. (Published by Nightboat Books, 2020)
