In Conversation: On Boys of Alabama

Genevieve Hudson is the author of Pretend We Live Here: Stories, and lives in Portland, Oregon but she is originally from Alabama. In Genevieve Hudson’s debut novel, Boys of Alabama (Liveright) a sensitive teen, newly arrived in Alabama, falls in love, questions his faith, and navigates a strange power. His German parents don’t know what to make of a South, but shy Max thrives in the thick heat. Taken in by the football team, he learns how to catch a spiraling ball, how to point a gun, and how to hide his innermost secrets. He’s welcomed into their world of basement beer drinking. In his new canvas pants and thickening muscles, Max feels like he’s “playing dress-up.” Then he meets Pan, the school “witch,” and the pair embarks on an all-consuming relationship, queer love in the country of God, guns, and football. As they share stories they can’t decide whose past is darker, and what is more frightening—their true selves, or staying true in Alabama. Michelle Tea, author of Against Memoir, called Boys of Alabama “A gripping, uncanny, and queer exploration of being a boy in America, told with detail that dazzles and disturbs.”

Kristen Arnett is a queer fiction and essay writer. Her debut short fiction collection was titled Felt in the Jaw. What does it take to come back to life? In Kristen Arnett’s Mostly Dead Things (Tin House Books) this is not an abstract question. Jessa-Lynn Morton has stepped up to manage his failing taxidermy business after her father’s suicide while the rest of the family crumbles. Her mother starts sneaking into the shop to make provocative animal art. Her brother, Milo, withdraws. And Brynn, Milo’s wife—and the only person Jessa’s ever been in love with—walks out without a word. Just when the Mortons reach a tipping point, a string of unexpected incidents begins to open up surprising possibilities and second chances. But will they be enough to salvage this family, to help them find their way back to one another? Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!, called it ” one of the strangest and funniest and most surprising first novels I’ve ever read. A love letter to Florida and to family, to half-lit swamps and the 7/11, and to the beasts that only pretend to hold their poses inside us. In Kristen Arnett’s expert hands, taxidermy becomes a language to capture our species’ impossible and contradictory desire to be held and to be free.”