The Definitive Book Of Pick-up Ledes By Max Delsohn
Book club meets tomorrow night with Max!
I (still) haven’t read much Hemingway, despite my mother’s and Torrey Peters’ sound arguments. I think of Hemingway often when I read a particularly efficient sentence. At an impressionable age, my mother told me he would go into bookstores and pencil edit out extraneous words from his published books. Perhaps the story is apocryphal, but it made the point.
Max Delsohn’s stories in Crawl are full of transmasc narrators that pull at your heart and friends/lovers/bosses/passerbys that frustrate even as they delight. That would be enough! But, the words. My god, the sentences. Tightly wound, they pack a meaningful punch and have you humming along.
See this description of Denny-Blaine, a queer “beach” spot in Seattle:
Here you were bound to see someone you’d fucked, someone you’d fucked had fucked, someone you thought you could love or someone you fucking hated.
Or, after witnessing a lawn exercise involving giant plastic human-sized hamster balls:
The whole think reeked of team-building.
Every single story in this collection hooks a reader from the jump. I’m reminded of another, more notorious Max, who rose to fame and fortune peddling his art of the pick-up line. They both invite you to bull up a bar stool, except this Max (my preferred model,) uses his verbal superpower to celebrate the human experience, not exploit it.
A handful of Max Delsohn’s great openers:
Crawl
There in the bright, near-empty sports bar, Jack decided that this would be the year he loved men.
All Time Low:
I dated a straight girl. Just once.
The Bubble
On the first sunny day of the season, the city of Seattle went to Cal Anderson Park. It wore shorts, tank tops, bikinis, flip-flops, sun hats, and cutoff overalls; it lounged on beach towels, jumped for Frisbees, clustered under red maples, crouched to pet French bulldogs slobbering exuberantly. It shouted and smiled with alien urgency, and every breath it took seemed to crackle with potential. On the first sunny day of the season, the city of Seattle remembered it was alive.
The Machine
On Friday as always I built the damn machine.
Moon over Denny-Blaine
People called it a beach, but it wasn’t. People called it paradise, but baby, it wasn’t. It was a public park shoved against a lake.
Max Delsohn joins the Being Alive Book Club tomorrow, Monday Nov 17th on Zoom at 8p ET / 5p PT. All are welcome, RSVP for the link.
Trying a new thing! Going to pick a name from the book club hat tomorrow night live. Want a chance to win this signed copy of Crawl? Drop a comment over in the chat.
Press Play
Dr. Tressie McMilian Cottom talks with Glennon, Abby, and Amanda on We Can Do Hard Things. “Desire and creativity really resists power…” — TMC
James Baldwin’s Biographer Nicholas Boggs on the meaning of love. (NYT Book Review podcast)
The Being Alive Book Club is an open invitation to read trans authors.
BABC is open to ALL— there are many ways to participate, none of which absolutely require reading the (entire) book. We do, though, highly endorse the reading. More questions? New here? Check out the Being Alive Book Club FAQ!