"Chaotic, sexy, and binge-worthy as hell, Be Gay, Do Crime is an EVENT."-Ruth Madievsky, author of All Night Pharmacy
A follow-up to their runaway success Peach Pit: Sixteen Stories of Unsavory Women, editors Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley return with Be Gay, Do Crime, a celebration of queer chaos from an all-queer author lineup featuring Myriam Gurba, Emily Austin, Alissa Nutting, and Francesca Ekwuyasi
A trans woman makes increasingly frequent hoax calls to a business where she's had a negative experience, watching the consequences with perverse joy. A group of aging queers turns to bank robbery to stop the sale of their bungalow complex to a development company. As the president prepares to give a speech, two women lurk among the journalists, ready to shoot him. And an aspiring author takes to stealing items from strangers' homes in a kind of cosmic redistribution each time one of her relationships fail.
In sixteen brilliant, wild-eyed stories,
Be Gay, Do Crime delivers a celebration and reckoning of why queer people turn to crime-unintentionally, as a means of survival, as protest, as rescue, or to right injustices big and small.
Author: Molly Llewellyn,Alissa Nutting
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 06/03/2025
Pages: 203
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.50w x 1.20d
ISBN: 9781938603310
Review Citation(s): Library Journal 03/14/2025 pg. 1
About the AuthorAlissa Nutting is a novelist, screenwriter, and showrunner, most recently of the Adult Swim MAX animated series
Teenage Euthanasia and the MAX original comedy
Made For Love based on her
New York Times Editor's Choice novel of the same name.
Anna Dorn is the author of the novels
Perfume Pain, Exalted, and
Vagablonde. Exalted was nominated for an L.A. Times Book Prize. Her next book
American Spirits is forthcoming for Simon and Schuster. She lives in Los Angeles.
Aurora Mattia was born in Hong Kong and lives in Texas. Her first book,
The Fifth Wound, is published by Nightboat Books. Her second book,
Unsex Me Here, is published by Coffee House Press. 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 Pérez. She's working on a new novel called
Seven Come Eleven, and writing some country songs.
Emily R. Austin is the author of
Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, Interesting Facts About Space, and the poetry collection,
Gay Girl Prayers. She was born in Ontario, Canada, and has received two writing grants from the Canadian Council for the Arts. She studied English literature and library science at Western University. She currently lives in Ottawa, in the territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation.
francesca ekwuyasi is a learner, artist and storyteller born in Lagos, Nigeria. She was awarded the Writers Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers in 2022 for her debut novel
Butter Honey Pig Bread (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020). Butter Honey Pig Bread was also shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award, the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, the Amazon Canada First Novel Award and longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Dublin Literary Award.
Butter Honey Pig Bread placed second on CBC's Canada Reads: Canada's Annual Battle of the Books, where it was selected as one of five contenders in 2021 for "the one book that all of Canada should read." She is co-author of
Curious Sounds: A Dialogue in Three Movements, a multi-genre collaborative book with Roger Mooking. francesca was Queens University's 2023 Carolyn Smart Writer in Residence, her writing has appeared in the
Malahat Review, Transition Magazine, Room Magazine, Brittle Paper, the Ex-Puritan, C-Magazine, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Canadian Art, Chatelain and elsewhere. Her short story Ọrun is Heaven was longlisted for the 2019 Journey Prize.
Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is a lesbian writer of essays, short stories, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. She is the author of
Helen House (Burrow Press 2022), a queer horror novelette. She is the managing editor of Autostraddle and the managing editor of TriQuarterly. Her short stories appear in
McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Catapult, The Offing, Joyland, The Rumpus, and others. She was a 2021 nonfiction fellow and a 2023 speculative fiction writer in residence at Lambda Literary's Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices. She is a 2023-2024 Tin House Reading Fellow.
Maame Blue is a Ghanaian-Londoner, creative writing tutor and author of the novel Bad Love, which won the 2021 Betty Trask award, and was shortlisted for the Betty Trask Prize. Her short stories have been published in
Not Quite Right For Us (Flipped Eye Publishing),
New Australian Fiction 2020 (Kill Your Darlings), and
Joyful, Joyful (Pan Macmillan). Maame is a recipient of the 2022 Society of Authors Travelling Scholarship and was a 2022 POCC Artist-in-Residence. She contributes regularly to Royal Literary Fund publication Writers Mosaic and her writing has appeared in many places including Refinery29, The Independent and iNews. Her second novel
The Rest Of You will be published by Amistad (US) and Verve Books (UK) in Autumn 2024.
Marisa (Mac) Crane is a queer, nonbinary writer. Their debut novel,
I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself, was a January Indie Next Pick and NYT Editors' Choice. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in
The Adroit Journal, The Offing, Joyland, No Tokens, Florida Review, Passages North, Lit Hub, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere, and their second novel,
A Sharp Endless Need, is forthcoming from Dial Press in March 2025.
Myriam Gurba is the author of several books. Her most recent essay collection,
Creep: Accusations and Confessions, is a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. Her writing has also appeared in the
Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Paris Review and the
Believer. She enjoys solving crossword puzzles and binge watching
Real Housewives.
Myriam Lacroix was born in Montreal to a Québécois mother and a Moroccan father, and currently lives in Vancouver. She has a BFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and an MFA from Syracuse University, where she was editor in chief of
Salt Hill Journal and received the New York Public Humanities Fellowship for creating Out-Front, an LGBTQ+ writing group whose goal was to expand the possibilities of queer writing.
Priya Guns wrote
Your Driver is Waiting.
Sam Cohen is the author of
Sarahland. Her fiction also appears in
Bomb, Fence, O Magazine, Electric Literature, and others.
SJ Sindu is a Tamil diaspora author of two literary novels (
Marriage of a Thousand Lies, which won the Publishing Triangle Edmund White Award; and
Blue-Skinned Gods, which was an Indie Next Pick and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award), two graphic novels (
Shakti and
Tall Water), and one collection of short stories (
The Goth House Experiment). Sindu holds a PhD in English and Creative Writing from Florida State University and is a co-editor for Zero Street, a literary fiction series featuring LGBTQ+ authors through the University of Nebraska Press. Sindu is an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. More at sjsindu.com or @sjsindu on Twitter/Instagram/Threads.
Soula Emmanuel was born in Dublin to an Irish mother and a Greek father. She studied at universities in Ireland and Sweden, emerging with a master's in economic demography. In 2023, her debut novel
Wild Geese was published by Footnote Press and the Feminist Press at CUNY. She currently lives on Ireland's east coast and is working on a second novel.
Temim Fruchter is a queer nonbinary anti-Zionist Jewish writer who lives in Brooklyn, NY. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland, and is the recipient of fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Vermont Studio Center, and a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award. She is co-host of Pete's Reading Series in Brooklyn. Her debut novel,
City of Laughter, is out now from Grove Atlantic.
Works by
Venita Blackburn have appeared in the
New Yorker, NY Times, Harper's, McSweeney's, Story Magazine, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Paris Review, and others. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship in 2014 and several Pushcart prize nominations. She received the Prairie Schooner book prize for fiction, which resulted in the publication of her collected stories,
Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, in 2017. In 2018 she earned a place as a finalist for the PEN/Bingham award for debut fiction, finalist for the NYPL Young Lions award and was recipient of the PEN America Los Angeles literary prize in fiction. Blackburn's second collection of stories is
How to Wrestle a Girl, 2021, finalist for a Lambda Literary Prize and was a NYTimes editor's choice. Her debut novel,
Dead in Long Beach, California, is about the mania of grief, all of human history and a lesbian assassin at the end of the world. She is the founder and president of Live, Write, an organization devoted to offering free creative writing workshops for communities of color: livewriteworkshop.com. Her hometown is Compton, California, and she is an associate professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.