For the first time, the best pieces of D. Travers Scott’s celebrated short fiction from the past twenty years are gathered together. Love Hard collects work originally appearing in award-winning anthologies, underground queer ‘zines, erotica magazines, and live performance, along with new stories never before published. Together, they offer the first comprehensive overview of Scott’s ongoing explorations of masculinity, sexuality, cities, family, love, and the power of writing. All stories are newly revised for this collection.
For over two decades, D. Travers Scott has worked as a writer, critic, and artist, appearing everywhere from underground ‘zines to Harper’s and This American Life. He is author of two novels: the internationally acclaimed Execution, Texas: 1987 and the Lambda Literary Award winner, One of these Things is Not Like the Other. After many years in the advertising industry, he is currently completing a PhD at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. He and his husband live in Los Angeles.
Praise for Love Hard
“Scott’s writing is all word-muscle – lean, fluid and kinetic with absolutely no wasted motion whether he’s working in fiction or those terrific little essay-punches he hits you with like “Everclear,” which takes on the band and the beverage with equal ease or “EuroTex,” a sharply observed analysis of his dichomatic relationship with both Texas and Europe. And then he effortlessly blends fiction and journaling in something like “It’s Not You,” a skillful look at the dissolution of a relationship that never really was.” — Out In Print
“With a ferocious eye for the traumas and dramas of gay, almost-gay, and not-quite-gay life, D. Travers Scott navigates the brutality, pageantry, and absurdity of desire and its consequences. Picture this: a new wave skinhead flight attendant with a lipstick-shaped cock, lip-syncing to “AEIOU Sometimes Y” in a boiler room. From a coke party with a chubby chaser in a Volvo to an analysis of the graphic design of the Everclear label (yes, the grain alcohol), Scott inhabits and explodes the striptease of the happy ending. Yes, my dear, it’s time to Love Hard.” —Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of So Many Ways to Sleep Badly
“I can’t stress enough just how wonderful it is and how lucky we are to have a new D. Travers Scott book for our reading pleasure. These stories will delight you with their insight into the messy beauty of being queer, being human. Travers is a natural born story-teller, bringing together formal inventiveness with pure accessibility. Full of wit, verve and vision, this book will seep into your dreams and remind you how strange and interesting it is to be alive.” —Alistair McCartney
“D. Travers Scott’s remarkable LOVE HARD fiercely charts the charged spaces between people in love. Sexy, nuanced and funny, the stories have an amazingly keen-eyed wisdom about the heat and the heart that gets generated when men collide. The sparks are truly flying in this extraordinary collection.” —Tim Miller, performer and author of Body Blows and 1001 Beds
“Love Hard is a passionate yet unsentimental look at white gay male culture in all its infuriating, contradictory, and beautiful facets. In playful, rhythmic prose, Scott conjures a world of unlikely collisions between even unlikelier characters: a skinhead substitute airline pilot, a pudgy, self-conscious gym recruiter, and my favorite, EuroTex, as they fuck, fight, and frenetically engage in the labor of love. Love Hard’s eloquent language samples camp hysterics, kitsch ironies, and club beats, combining them into one gorgeous, sensual and sensory literary experience.” —Jennifer Natalya Fink, award-winning author of BURN and V
Praise for D. Travers Scott’s earlier work:
“Funny and disturbing … I applaud him” —David Sedaris
“At turns funny, creepy, and frustrated … seethes with complex erotic tensions” —Village Voice
“No one should ever accuse D. Travers Scott of playing it safe. … Brutal, twisted and sometimes completely frustrating … It’s rare to come across a writer this fearless and original” —The Weekly News, Miami
“Sick Fuck of the Week Award” —Salon
“Dazzling” —Publisher’s Weekly
“Wonderfully evocative … probably the most interesting gay debut novel since Dale Peck’s” —Melbourne Star-Observer
“Beautiful … [an] elegance of writing that keeps sensory matter the fore, halfway between Flaubert and Straight to Hell” —Robert Glück
“With wit and precision, D. Travers Scott makes each sentence ring” —James McManus
“Exquisitely disquieting … corrosive” —The Stranger, Seattle
“The moody, specter-ridden dreamscape of Lynch and the lyrical wit of Fitzgerald” —San Francisco Chronicle
“The edge and underbelly of gay literature” —Brett Josef Grubisic, XTRA! West, Vancouver, BC
“If he ain’t American creep-out catnip, what is?” —San Francisco Weekly
“Kind of like Sesame Street—written by Clive Barker, directed by David Lynch and starring Crispin Glover as Elmo” —Instinct
“An amazingly adept wordsmith …who can starkly paint every detail against the inside of your eyelids so that the images linger … dark, gritty, psychological insight into human development” —Stonewall News Northwest
