At Night Only

Christopher Stoddard

$18.00 | ISBN: 978-09976432-1-3 | Jun. 2018

Paperback | 5.5x8.5” | 214pp

A TRAGEDY FOR THE NEW MILLENNIUM

A producer at an advertising firm, whose gender and name are never revealed, recounts a disturbing tale of emotional fixation and eventual rejection by the two key figures in their life, leaving them bereft of self-esteem and violently desperate. The first of these obsessions is a promiscuous yet charismatic underground art star whose psychic power and extreme drug use draw the main character into a disorienting world of gallery openings and sex-fueled parties. The second, a handsome actor narcissistically preoccupied with his budding movie career, offers moments of sex and tenderness punctuated by irrational tirades of anger, before he tires of the main character’s overweening love and threatens abandonment.

Both these relationships weave their harrowing stories against a brilliantly evoked background of contemporary Brooklyn and Manhattan, a place where advertising and consumption have even corrupted the language we use to speak about love. At Night Only is a tragedy that could only be written in this new millennium. 

ADDITIONAL BUYING OPTIONS

  • "A depressingly beautiful portrait of the metropolitan human." – Kirkus Reviews

    "Stylish, despairing, enviable..." – Edmund White, recipient of the 2018 PEN / Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction

    "A wonderfully written novel about how we live now and all the things we're not supposed to say about it. It’s about love and sex and betrayal and confusion, but running through it is the sheer horror of coming of age in America." – Gary Indiana

    "A vivid snapshot of the clashing sensibilities of New York City’s party scene and its rapidly gentrifying culture. With its gorgeously flawed characters and complex, struggling relationships, the novel provides an unconventional portrait of New York, one in which creativity still thrives and where living one’s life can be its own troubled art, its own statement." – Lambda Literary

    "Though dubbed a tragedy on the jacket, At Night Only looks unrelentingly for a way out of fake love, fake relationships, and fake identities." - The Paris Review

    "Christopher Stoddard’s new novel charts the rough path to queer self-knowledge." - Slate

    "It's more revelation than downer, illuminating edgy aspects of contemporary urban life that will go unexperienced by many of us." - Square Books

  • Christopher Stoddard is the author of At Night Only, Limiters, and White, Christian.