Description

---

Queer stories about love, loneliness, the surreal, and the self

The stories in Tell Me feature queer men of various ages reckoning with loneliness, selfishness, and the struggle for self-discovery and identity. In “The Vanisher,” a young bisexual man struggling with his own desire to be seen receives a bandana that allows him to become invisible. In “Retreat,” a widower travels to an artists’ colony to seek an audience with his recently deceased husband. And in “We Are Rendered Silent,” people lose their ability to speak when a man they love dies. Through Baumann’s inventive employment of the strange and surreal, these stories set out to explore the bizarre and often confounding experience of navigating modern-day queerness. With his unique voice and magnificent imagination, Baumann fully immerses readers in the queer experience.
 

About the Author

---

JOE BAUMANN is the author of the short story collections Sing with Me at the Edge of Paradise, The Plagues, Where Can I Take You When There’s Nowhere to Go, and Hot Lips, and the novels I Know You’re Out There Somewhere and Lake, Drive. His fiction and essays have appeared in Third Coast, Passages North, Phantom Drift, and many others. 

Praise For…

---

“Like the act of turning a crystal in sunlight, this sharp collection prismatically throws unexpected and beautiful angles, illuminating with grace the lives of queer characters grappling with grief, belonging, desire, a shifting sense of identity, and the ways we are transformed by love. Baumann contributes, with his own style and sensibility, to the larger conversation of what it means to be a queer person in the world today, when equality looks more complicated than abstract notions of capital-P Progress, because freedom has to do with our messy, unreliable, unrelenting hearts.” —Peter Kispert, author of I Know You Know Who I Am