Unsex Me Here Aurora Mattia 9781566897112

"These are stories about attempting to outrun time; about trying to remember transfemme pasts; about magic touching everything except the possibility of lasting love."

From a shapeshifting garden somewhere in Michigan to a West Texas town with a supernatural past, from a stalactite cavern in the birthplace of Aphrodite to a secret waterfall in Texarkana: from nowhere to anywhere, Aurora Mattia chases glimpses of paradise. Her gemstone prose shatters into starbursts of heartbreak and rapture, gossip and holy babble, bringing together a cast of spiders, sibyls, angels, mermaids, girlfriends, and goddesses in vain pursuit of their unnameable selves. Their perils are as dense with symbolism as they are refined by desire-if beauty is the labyrinth, it is also the light.

Tied together by the strings of a corset, Unsex Me Here is a dazzling showcase of other worlds near and distant, and the high femme ramblers who've found and lost their way through them.

Aurora Mattia was born in Hong Kong and lives in Texas. Her first book, The Fifth Wound, was published by Nightboat Books. Her stories have appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, Prairie Schooner, SPASM, Joyland, and elsewhere; and also in exhibitions at the RISD Museum and the Renaissance society, accompanying portraits by Elle Perez. She's working on a new novel called Seven Come Eleven, and writing some country songs. She believes in a free Palestine and an end to ICE, from the Rio Grande to the Jordan River, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Mediterranean Sea.

Praise for Unsex Me Here

"A fairy tale, in the classic, sparkling, and powerful ways." -Michelle Tea, author of Black Wave

"Aurora Mattia writes from the point where passion, pleasure, and fury are transmuted into ecstatic vision. She intervenes into the perennial concerns of trans writing-how to confess without betraying, and how to resist the temptation to simplify experience to something coherent and false. These stories are ruptures in the taut skin of reality, but listen closely and you can hear the implacable, promiscuous mind of a trans woman of our era, trying again and again to break through to the real truth." -Emily Zhou, author of Girlfriends

Past Praise:

Praise for The Fifth Wound

"Aurora Mattia's The Fifth Wound is a strange book in all the best ways. Baroque and mythical, interdimensional and grounded, this novel is an exploration of passion, beauty, violence and loss. Chocked full of winding, brilliant sentences sure to turn readers' minds inside out, this is a tale of trans love and fantasy that engages with the full scope of the good, the frightening, and the profound." -Isle McElroy, Vulture

"In her new novel, Mattia reinvents the roman a clef with a magical realist memoir that puts the dusty genre of autofiction to shame. Sifting from multiple narratives-and dimensions-The Fifth Wound is a romance, a meditation on transphobic violence, and a speculative tale of time travel, ecstatic visionaries, and mystical union." -Ed Simon, The Millions

"The Fifth Wound contains some of the most deliriously, convulsively, terrifyingly beautiful writing I've ever seen. In the delicate, fleshy membrane of her prose, Mattia holds shards of pain, defiance, erudition, and above all passion-with all the biblical resonances of that word. The book is an astonishment." -Barbara Browning, author of The Gift