BOYS OF ALABAMA
Named a Most Anticipated Book by Esquire, Oprah Daily, Entertainment Weekly, Ms Magazine, Lit Hub, and Lambda Literary. An Apple Best Book of May. An Amazon Best Book of May. Finalist for the Oregon Book Award. Shortlisted for the Stonewall Book Award. Southern Indie Booksellers Alliance Okra Pick.
In this bewitching debut novel, a sensitive teen, newly arrived in Alabama, falls in love, questions his faith, and navigates a strange power. Although his German parents don’t know what to make of a South pining for the past, shy Max thrives after being taken in by the football team. But when he meets fishnet-wearing Pan in physics class, they embark on a quixotic, consuming relationship. The boys, however, aren’t sure whose past is darker, and what is more frightening—their true selves, or staying true in Alabama.
“Hudson’s writing is magnetic. It’s the Kristen Stewart of prose – chameleon-like, layered, funny and serious and sad, really gay, and so attractive.... It wrecked me, just like I wanted.... Hudson grew up in Alabama, and their complex relationship with the place shines through in this story, which quietly and then loudly hurtles toward a climax that had me staring into space for a full 10 minutes after I read it.”
—SARAH NEILSON, Them, “5 Queer Books We Loved in 2020”
“This novel is a love song to outsiders of all kinds, a queer love story about the ways we find to heal ourselves and each other, and proof that there can be magic amid the burdens of masculinity.
—MELISSA FEBOS, author of Dry Season and Abandon Me
“A gripping, uncanny, and queer exploration of being a boy in America, told with detail that dazzles and disturbs. I really love this book.”
—MICHELLE TEA, author of Against Memoir
“The magic contained in Boys of Alabama's pages isn't just fixed in the beauty of its sentences; it's seen in the way that Hudson carefully crafts the intimacy between people and how she tenderly exposes queerness.”
—KRISTEN ARNETT, author of Mostly Dead Things
“Boys of Alabama brilliantly reinvents the Southern Gothic... An absolutely magical novel.”
—LENI ZUMAS, author of Red Clocks
“Hudson [depicts'] a brand of Southern-fried masculinity that is immediately recognizable and startlingly fresh. This is an exquisite book.”
—NICK WHITE, author of How to Survive a Summer
PRETEND WE LIVE HERE
A Finalist for the 2018 Lambda Literary Award. Entropy’s Best Books of 2018.
In her debut collection of stories, Genevieve Hudson explores the idea of home and what it means to find one: in the body, in the world, in other people. Her characters are seekers, whose actions are influenced by their slippery identities and by the strange landscapes that surround them. Set in Amsterdam, the Pacific Northwest, and the Deep South, these stories hum with sexual tension, queerness, displacement, longing, humor, and dark nostalgia.
“A terrific collection of stories. There are echoes here of Flannery O’Connor, Barry Hannah, and Denis Johnson, but Genevieve Hudson is her own writer—impressively and gloriously so. Her eye for the clinching detail is unnerving and her sympathies are fascinatingly conflicted. I hope, and suspect, this book will be the start of a long and inspiring career.”
—TOM BISSELL, author of The Disaster Artist and Magic Hours
“Jagged, queer, and nervy, these stories beat with an urgent, potent pulse.”
— CHELSEY JOHNSON, author of Stray City
“Pretend We Live Here is collection rare and precious as sighting a white wolf–a must read.”
—LAMBDA LITERARY
“This might be the closest thing to a perfect book that I’ve read in quite a while.”
—THE BIG SMOKE
A LITTLE LOVE IN EVERYONE
Growing up queer in the deep South, Genevieve Hudson longed for stories about lives like their own. She turned to Alison Bechdel’s groundbreaking graphic memoir, Fun Home. In its panels, she found sly references to Bechdel’s personal influences. A Little in Love with Everyone is Hudson’s journey down a rabbit hole of queer heroes like Audre Lorde, Eileen Myles, and Adrienne Rich, who turned their stories into art and empowered future generations to embrace their own truths.
“Sooner or later, we start searching for our histories,’ Genevieve Hudson writes in A Little in Love with Everyone. Hudson’s debut exploration of queerness, art, preservation, and the narrative threads of survival is a heroic feat. A meditation as inviting as it is illuminating on the visibility and invisibility of desire, this book will give you the feeling of being let in on the best-kept secret of all. Required reading.”
—T KIRA MADDEN, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls
“This is the queer commentary book I needed as a teenager, and in my twenties, and today. Genevieve Hudson is a bold and intelligent new voice.”
—CHLOE CALDWELL, author of Women & Trying
“Genevieve Hudson crafts a diverse celebration of queer history in a playfully personal yet astute book, a hybrid of analysis and confession and love letter. I can’t think of a better way to honor Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home or acknowledge the importance of queer mentors than Hudson’s A Little in Love with Everyone.”
—TOMAS MONIZ, author of Big Familia & All Friends Are Necessary