Rebel Satori press is excited to announce the acquisition of Performer Non Grata by Brian Alessandro.
Risk Bonaventura, a successful but insecure investment banker, moves his family from New York to Madrid to buy his way into bullfighting (a brutal childhood dream meant to edify his ego) only to be struck by conscience mid-fight and left seriously injured by the bull. What follows is a threesome with his professor wife, Lorna, (based in part on Camille Paglia) and Javier Forza, a Spanish matador whom he envies and obsesses over, and a sadistic crime, as well as meditations on beauty and disfigurement, arrogance and humiliation, toxic masculinity and the power of the feminine, the new lords of social media, cancel culture, and political correctness, and various permutations of sexuality. In the background the couples’ queer video artist son, Theo, comes of age and engages in surreptitious spite work.
Brian Alessandro’s satire is warm but stinging. His view of toxic masculinity is accurate and compassionate. He is inventive, funny, odd. He’s speaking to our crazy times. —Edmund White
Alessandro has written a psychoanalytic farce on our strange political moment, using the Bonaventura family as a decoder. I laughed and groaned my way through this family’s mishaps. Alessandro is working in an endangered queer genre; it’s rare to find such Sadean wickedness and wit in a contemporary novel. —Garrard Conley, author of Boy Erased
By turns biting and grotesque, audacious and cruel, Performer Non Grata pierces through the absurdity of how and why we keep deifying masculinity. —Manuel Munoz, three-time O Henry Award winner and author of What You See in The Dark
In sharp, nuanced prose, Brian Alessandro cuts to the core of the human psyche. Strident and imaginative all at once, this novel is a welcome throwback to the kind of unchained fiction that makes so many readers want to write in the first place. As such, Performer Non Grata offers itself up as a vivid, necessary montage of desire, narcissism, and toxic masculinity. —Chris Campanioni, editor-in-chief of PANK and author of The Internet is For Real
Brian Alessandro has written for Interview Magazine, Newsday, PANK, Huffington Post, and has recently adapted Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story into a graphic novel for Top Shelf Production. Additionally, he co-edited Fever Spores: The Queer Reclamation of William S. Burroughs, an anthology of essays and interviews about Burroughs for Rebel Satori Press. He is also the co-founder and editor in chief of the literary journal, The New Engagement. His first novel, The Unmentionable Mann, was published in 2015 by Cairn Press and his first feature film, Afghan Hound, was produced by Maryea Media in 2011, and is currently streaming on Plex and Tubi.
Performer Non Grata will be released in 2023
Photo credit: Anthony Scutro