Description
Performer Non Grata
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 couple’s queer video artist son, Theo, comes of age and engages in surreptitious spite work.
It melted my face off, – Gal Beckerman, books editor for The Atlantic
Brian Alessandro is savagely calm, fiercely erudite, and fully determined to show us everything – everything – he sees. – Kathe Koja, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Under the Poppy and The Cipher
Brian Alessandro’s Performer Non Grata is a face-meltingly perverse satire-cum-farce, a sort of contemporary love child of Wilde and Burroughs, streaming with blood, splooge, booze, snot, bitcoin, litcoin—and prancing with turgidity. Theater as novel, and vice versa, with no guide for determining the gaslight from the candelabra, the performance from the performance-within-the-performance, colonized from colonizer, faux-minist from feminist, ancient myth from YouTube voyeurism, victim from perp. Who, or what, is there to root for beneath the effluvial wreckage? In a novel whose allegory is the bullfight, I ended up cheering for the bull! —Diane Seuss, Pulitzer Prize winning author of frank: sonnets
Hold on tight. Brian Alessandro’s Performer Non Grata is a bucking bull ride of a novel. Placing an American family in the milieu of the Spanish toreadors, Alessandro deftly makes a scathing commentary on the most toxic manifestations of traditional masculinity, homophobia, and society’s obsession with spectacle. Like Genet’s Querelle of Brest, Performer Non Grata takes Oscar Wilde’s famous quote, “each man kills the thing he loves,” and runs with it, pushing the dynamics of sexual relationships to the very limits of morality. One can place Alessandro’s work among the most irreverent satires of Roth, Albee, and White. And even though the trajectory of Alessandro’s lovers’ entanglements is a proverbial train wreck, Alessandro skillfully and compassionately imbues his characters with an uncommon humanity. As the novel centers on the world of Spanish bullfighting, with taut, muscular prose, one cannot help but recall Hemingway—only Alessandro turns Hemingway’s antiquated machismo on its head and kicks it directly in its manhood. Performer Non Grata is a tour de force of satire for our times. —David Santos Donaldson, playwright and author of the novel, Greenland.
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 and The Consequences
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, author of The Internet is For Real and A and B and Also Nothing
A madhouse novel, both scathing and unforgettably tender, in which the real and the absurd are one…Alessandro is a virtuoso. —Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Drown, and This Is How You Lose Her
A wild sex-soaked ride! —Iris Smyles, author of Droll Tales and Iris Has Free Time.
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 (available to stream on Amazon, Tubi and Plex) was produced by Maryea Media in 2011.
Cover design by Igor Karash (c) 2022.
Actor and two-time winner of the Audio Publishers Association’s Best Male Narrator Audie Award Edoardo Ballerini reads Part II Chapter I of Brian Alessandro’s novel, “Performer Non Grata.”
