A transformational, transformative story about video games, three queer friends, and the code(s) they learn to survive, from the winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Trans Fiction
1998: Lilith, Sash, and Abraxa are teenagers, scattered across the country but joined by the Internet. They are making Saga of the Sorceress, a video game that will change everything, if only for the three of them.
Eighteen years later, Saga of the Sorceress still exists only on the scattered drives of its creators. Lilith works as a loan underwriter at a rinky-dink bank in Manhattan, a trans woman in a very cis world. Sash is in Brooklyn, working as a part-time webcam dominatrix. Neither knows that the other is in New York, or that Abraxa is just across the Hudson River, sleeping on the floor of a friend’s Jersey City home after a disaster at sea. They have never met in person, and have been out of touch for years, but none have forgotten the sorceress, or her unfinished quest.
This new book by Jeanne Thornton, one of trans America’s brightest literary stars, queers our notion of nostalgia as it expertly blends literature with technology.
Praise for A/S/L
“Beyond astonishing, imbued with witchery, lust, the isolation and connection of a game, devastating heartbreak, and the ageless, aching wrap of friendship and time. I can’t remember the last time a trans novel affected me this deeply. I can’t remember the last time any novel affected me this deeply. Jeanne Thornton is like a literary sorceress becoming more and more powerful with every new volume.” —Casey Plett, author of Little Fish
Praise for Jeanne Thornton
“I suspect [Summer Fun] will come to be considered the Pet Sounds of trans literature: a masterpiece that feels both astonishingly new and comfortingly familiar.” —Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby “In Summer Fun, Jeanne Thornton, that slow-burn superstar, has dropped a punk’s pop masterpiece.” —Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl
“Summer Fun is a fully realized vision so strange and compelling that even in writing this blurb I still can't quite shake the sensation of having genuinely known these characters, if only for a short and magical while." —Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox
Jeanne Thornton is the author of Summer Fun, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction, as well as The Black Emerald and The Dream of Doctor Bantam. Her fiction has appeared in n+1, WIRED, Evergreen Review, and other places. She is an editor at Feminist Press, as well as copublisher of Instar Books and coeditor of the Ignatz Award-winning We're Still Here: An All-Trans Comics Anthology. She lives in Brooklyn, and more information is available at jeannethornton.com.
A transformational, transformative story about video games, three queer friends, and the code(s) they learn to survive, from the winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Trans Fiction
1998: Lilith, Sash, and Abraxa are teenagers, scattered across the country but joined by the Internet. They are making Saga of the Sorceress, a video game that will change everything, if only for the three of them.
Eighteen years later, Saga of the Sorceress still exists only on the scattered drives of its creators. Lilith works as a loan underwriter at a rinky-dink bank in Manhattan, a trans woman in a very cis world. Sash is in Brooklyn, working as a part-time webcam dominatrix. Neither knows that the other is in New York, or that Abraxa is just across the Hudson River, sleeping on the floor of a friend’s Jersey City home after a disaster at sea. They have never met in person, and have been out of touch for years, but none have forgotten the sorceress, or her unfinished quest.
This new book by Jeanne Thornton, one of trans America’s brightest literary stars, queers our notion of nostalgia as it expertly blends literature with technology.
Praise
Praise for A/S/L
“Beyond astonishing, imbued with witchery, lust, the isolation and connection of a game, devastating heartbreak, and the ageless, aching wrap of friendship and time. I can’t remember the last time a trans novel affected me this deeply. I can’t remember the last time any novel affected me this deeply. Jeanne Thornton is like a literary sorceress becoming more and more powerful with every new volume.” —Casey Plett, author of Little Fish
Praise for Jeanne Thornton
“I suspect [Summer Fun] will come to be considered the Pet Sounds of trans literature: a masterpiece that feels both astonishingly new and comfortingly familiar.” —Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby “In Summer Fun, Jeanne Thornton, that slow-burn superstar, has dropped a punk’s pop masterpiece.” —Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl
“Summer Fun is a fully realized vision so strange and compelling that even in writing this blurb I still can't quite shake the sensation of having genuinely known these characters, if only for a short and magical while." —Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox
Author
Jeanne Thornton is the author of Summer Fun, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction, as well as The Black Emerald and The Dream of Doctor Bantam. Her fiction has appeared in n+1, WIRED, Evergreen Review, and other places. She is an editor at Feminist Press, as well as copublisher of Instar Books and coeditor of the Ignatz Award-winning We're Still Here: An All-Trans Comics Anthology. She lives in Brooklyn, and more information is available at jeannethornton.com.
