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One of Vulture, LitHub, The Millions, and Paperback Paris's Most Anticipated Books of 2021, one of Cosmopolitan's 30 New LGBTQ+ Books to Add to Your Reading List in 2021 and one of The Advocate's 22 LGBTQ+ Books You Absolutely Need to Read This Year
"Each story in 100 Boyfriends is a minor eclipse: stunning in scope, technically blinding, and entirely miraculous. I laughed and I cried and I laughed until I cried―Brontez Purnell is a marvel." --Bryan Washington, author of Memorial
An irrerverent, sensitive, and inimitable look at gay dysfunction through the eyes of a cult hero
Transgressive, foulmouthed, and brutally funny, Brontez Purnell’s 100 Boyfriends is a revelatory spiral into the imperfect lives of queer men desperately fighting the urge to self-sabotage. As they tiptoe through minefields of romantic, substance-fueled misadventure―from dirty warehouses and gentrified bars in Oakland to desolate farm towns in Alabama―Purnell’s characters strive for belonging in a world that dismisses them for being Black, broke, and queer. In spite of it―or perhaps because of it―they shine.
Armed with a deadpan wit, Purnell finds humor in even the darkest of nadirs with the peerless zeal, insight, and horniness of a gay punk messiah. Together, the slice-of-life tales that writhe within 100 Boyfriends are an inimitable tour of an unexposed queer underbelly. Holding them together is the vision of an iconoclastic storyteller, as fearless as he is human.
Author: Brontez Purnell
Paperback Published 2 February 2021 192 pages
Read and Recommended by Hendri:
"Witty, foulmouthed, and feral, 100 Boyfriends chronicles the episodic fragments of sexual encounters between the narrator and other men. Moving across different zones, from lunch breaks, offices, online dating platforms, to bars, Purnell reveals the dysfunctional sides of gay life while certainly exploring the many possibilities that we can carve out and make from our very own flaws."
"100 Boyfriends is a collection of short stories so wrigglingly alive and counterculturally refreshing that it deserves a new noun ― a pod of whales, a murder of crows, a jubilee of Brontez Purnell stories? I’d wager that he sets down the best first lines of any living writer." ―Molly Young, Vulture
"No one can write and tell a story like Brontez Purnell. This is a fact. I laughed, I cried, I winced, I gagged. I texted my friends whole pictures of pages while reading 100 Boyfriends . . . Every sentence in 100 Boyfriends made me giddy; Brontez Purnell writes about everything that goes on in your head before, during, and after sex with a wit and clarity that has become the hallmark of his work." --Jeffrey Masters, The Advocate
"[100 Boyfriends] reads like a series of 4 a.m. text messages received from a very smart and very messy friend ― when there’s no way you can wait till morning to respond, 'What the fuck? Are you OK? Did you at least have fun?' If Purnell is a living archive of the Bay’s queer and punk scenes in last two decades, 100 Boyfriends is an autofiction anthology of drug-fueled warehouse dwellers, queer skate kids, and regretless heartbreakers." --Saam Niami, Vulture