Everything Must Go

Lauren John Joseph (as “La JohnJoseph”)

$16.00 | ISBN: 978-0-9912196-4-3 | Mar. 2014

Paperback | 196pp

Finalist for the 2015 Lambda Literary Foundation Award in Transgender Fiction!

In a future-queer world of magically changing locations, perversely transformed historical figures and oodles of spatter-violence, an intersexual teen mother describes her road trip with a cast of surreal travel buddies. The goal of her final destination: unleashing the Apocalypse.

Riding in a banana-yellow convertible with our hero/ine is the strangely mature Baby, able to chat while still in the womb; as well as two Catholic Missionaries with a violent streak, a Charlie Chaplin who communicates only with cue cards, and Candy Bar, a winsome club kid who ends up fixing the face of Valentino’s corpse at his funeral.

Follow our hero/ine through a dreamlike jungle of orgies and terrorist explosions, described in language as word-rich and surreal as a Ronald Firbank novel. You’ll howl with laughter the whole time and have nightmares about it long after you come to the breathlessly ridiculous final page.

  • "What a wonderful novel! A strange and exquisite pleasure, a garden of earthly delights. Wildly funny, dirty, sexy, brutal, absurd, but always engaging and heartbreakingly human." – Jake Arnott

    "A queer Pynchonesque adventure." – Dazed Digital

    "Brutal and beautiful." – Lambda Literary

    "The shining currency of invention, worthy of an R. Firbank or Dame E. Sitwell." – Prix de Flore winner Bruce Benderson

     "After being sucked into La JohnJoseph’s lustalicious saison en enfer, my brain feels completely sullied and violated. Do it again, please!" – Travis Jeppesen, author of The Suiciders

  • British-born, American-educated Berlin resident Lauren John Joseph, (a.k.a. La JohnJoseph) is a performance artist and writer. The original scriptwriter for radical Californian Dada drag revue, BoyfriendRobotique, he is also a librettist and the author of the critically acclaimed solo memoir play Boy in a Dress. His performance work has taken him from the San Francisco MOMA to the Royal Opera House, and across Europe, the USA and into the Middle East. His short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and zines, including The Gay Times Book of Short Stories, Bird Song, P.S. I Love You, Fat Zine, and 21st Century Queer Artists Identify Themselves. Everything Must Go is his first novel.