Luckmonkey
by Alysia Constantine, Interlude Press: March, 2021. 196 pages.
By day, Luckmonkey is a struggling punk band playing in record stores and taco joints; by night, its members are anti-capitalist agitators, breaking into homes and businesses, each time stealing one possession and leaving something different in its place. Squatting in an abandoned building without electricity or heat, they scrounge a patched-together life as a raucous, mismatched family of queer, trans and first-gen social activists. But when one of them steals a wind-up monkey toy and brings it home, things begin to deteriorate into squabbles and bad decisions, until an arrest forces the group to weigh the hard work of political resistance against their individual needs for stability and safety.
Olympia Knife
by Alysia Constantine, Interlude Press: November 2017. 204 pages.
Born into a family of flying trapeze artists, Olympia Knife has one small problem: When her emotions rise, she becomes invisible. Everyone in the traveling circus has learned to live with this quirk; they banded together to raise Olympia in a loving environment when her parents vanished midair during their act, never to return. But the same fate befalls Arnold, the World’s Shortest Man, followed by one act after another, until the show is a crumbling mess of tattered tents and terrified performers. Into this chaos walks Diamond the Danger Eater. Olympia and Diamond forge a friendship, then fall in love and cling to each other even as the world around them falls apart.
Sweet
Alysia Constantine, Interlude Press:
Jules Burns is a lonely baker mourning the loss of his husband, Andy. Teddy Flores is a numbed-to-the-world accountant who accidentally stumbles into his bakery and, with the help of a mouthy baker’s assistant, some good pastry and Jules himself, rediscovers his deep connections to pleasure, to the world and to his own heart. Sweet is also the story of how we tell stories–of what we expect and need from a love story. The narrator is on to you, Reader, and wants to give you a love story that doesn’t always fit the bill. There are ghosts to exorcise, and jobs and money to worry about. Sweet is a love story, yes, but a story that reminds us that love is never quite what we expect, nor quite as blissfully easy as we hope.
Short Stuff
Alysia Constantine (Editor), Duet Books: June 9, 2020. 192 pages.
Lighthearted collection of YA short stories of young queer love. Edited and introduction by Alysia Constantine.
Alysia Constantine 