Let’s Get Back to the Party
₱1,038.00
Product Description
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”
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.
Review
“A miracle of a book. A love letter to queer friendship and queer love . . . that also, in its sparkling prose and exquisite storytelling, announces the arrival of a major talent.”—Nick White, author of How to Survive a Summer and Sweet & Low “With gorgeous, searching prose, Zak Salih looks beyond the gay culture wars to find the fractured souls within—and locates something deep and true and universal. This exceptional debut signals the arrival of a compelling new voice in fiction.”—Louis Bayard, author of Courting Mr. Lincoln “[A] searching, incisive debut novel . . . Estranged for decades, Salih’s dual protagonists spend the novel circling and avoiding each other, a dance of love, friendship and self-definition . . . Salih’s novel thrums with details and moments that keep the material from ever edging toward the schematic. Instead, Let’s Get Back to the Party is as rich in feeling and compelling in its storytelling as it is acute in its analysis. This gripping and thoughtful novel asks urgent questions about what it means to be a gay man in contemporary American culture.”—Shelf Awareness, starred review “The shifting landscape for gay men in America animates Salih’s heartfelt debut . . . The party may be changing, but reasons for celebration remain, as evidenced by Salih’s passionate evocation.” —Publishers Weekly “An insightful examination of two of the many ways gay men present themselves in contemporary America.”—Kirkus Reviews “A gorgeously written meditation on being a gay man in America now . . . Raw and captivating.”—BookPage “Poignant and poetic . . . Readers will find a compelling exploration of the experiences of queer people from different generations as two modern-day gay men figure out whether they want to conform to traditional views of relationships and marriage or break free entirely.”—Booklist “An insightful novel about what it means to be a gay man in a rapidly-changing America.”—Electric Literature, “27 Debuts to Look Forward To in the First Half of 2021” “The outpouring of praise and attention for this emotionally exacting novel is well-deserved. Not only because of the book’s raw, brilliant prose and the undertow of its storytelling—subtle yet forceful—but also because of the way the author deals with issues of represen
