Kirjahaku

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD 2024LONGLISTED FOR THE NOTA BENE PRIZE 2024The radical, joyful follow-up to the Goldsmiths Prize-winning Sterling Karat Gold.This is the story of Corey Fah, a writer on the cusp of a windfall, courtesy of the Social Evils prize committee, for whom the actual gong - and with it the prize money - remains tantalizingly out of reach.Neon beige, with UFO-like qualities, the elusive trophy leads Corey, with partner Drew and surprise eight-legged companion Bambi Pavok, on a spectacular detour through their childhood in the Forest - via an unlikely stint on reality TV. Navigating those twin horrors, through wormholes and time loops, Corey learns - the hard way - the difference between a prize and a gift.Both radiant and revolutionary, Isabel Waidner's fiction gleefully takes a hammer to false binaries, boundaries and borders, turning walls into bridges and words into wings. Fierce, fluid and funny, they free us to imagine another way of being.This is a novel about coming into one's own, the labour of love, the tendency of history to repeat itself and the pitfalls of social mobility. It's about watching TV with your lover.'A head-spinning, mind-bending roller coaster of fun, horror, and subversion. I love it' Kamila Shamsie 'Reading Waidner is like plugging into an electric socket of language and ideas' Guardian

Two men meet in a flat in London. They are total strangers and yet they look remarkably alike. Lewis is grieving his dead wife; Korine is hiding from his very-much-alive one. Lewis never had children; Korine is an ambivalent parent at best. Lewis is an erstwhile actor, too depressed to attend the big audition that has just fallen into his lap. Korine has tried a dozen dead-end jobs but never pursued his acting dreams.Two men living mirror image lives. Each seeking a second chance to get things right. Each wanting what the other has.As If is an existential farce about the road not taken. Surreal and slyly poignant, suffused with ironic melancholia, it is a parable for the twenty-first century everyman: a character trapped in reality’s hall of mirrors, endlessly searching for something to live for.

Two men meet in an apartment in London. They are strangers to one another, and yet they look remarkably alike. Lewis is grieving his dead wife; Korine is hiding from his very-much-alive one. Lewis never had children; Korine has just walked out on his. Lewis is a retired actor whose career never amounted to much beyond a bit part on a B-list sitcom; Korine has always dreamed of acting. Slowly and then all at once, each begins to live on the other's behalf. As Korine answers a casting call under Lewis's name, Lewis finds himself playing father to the other man's son. Each day the strange ruse becomes truer and stranger, more entrenched. Plunged into an existential game of cat-and-mouse, pursuit and retreat, they find that acting might make it possible to, finally, live. Isabel Waidner's As If is a wily, propulsive, and unusually wise novel about what happens when we fall out of our roles and attempt to make new ones: a tale of thwarted expectation, renewed ambition, and the possibility of escape. It is the story of two men, or maybe one: a love story and a ghost story both.

Like Franz Kafka's The Trial for the post-truth era, at once "surreal, polemical, and fun" (The Telegraph). Sterling Beckenbauer is plunged into a terrifying and nonsensical world one morning when they are attacked, then unfairly arrested, in their neighborhood in London. With the help of their friends, Sterling hosts a trial of their own in order to exonerate themselves and to hold the powers that be to account. Sterling Karat Gold, in the words of Kamila Shamsie, is "a madly brilliant and deeply sane novel that reveals surrealism as possibly the most effective way of talking about the political moment we find ourselves in." In it, Isabel Waidner concocts a world replete with bullfighters, high fashion, DIY theater, the Beach Boys, and time-traveling spaceships. The acclaimed winner of the 2021 Goldsmiths Prize for fiction that breaks the mold and extends the possibilities of the form, this novel explores the phantasmagoric nature of contemporary life, especially for nonbinary migrants, and daringly revises how solidarity and justice might be sought and won. Sterling Karat Gold couldn't be a better North American introduction to a writer with an irresistible style and unforgettable vision.

A novel that celebrates radical queer survival and gleefully takes a hammer to false notions of successThis is the story of Corey Fah, a writer who has hit the literary jackpot: their novel has just won the prize for the Fictionalization of Social Evils. But the actual trophy, and with it the funds, hovers peskily out of reach. Neon-beige, with UFO-like qualities, the elusive trophy leads Corey, with their partner Drew and eight-legged companion Bambi Pavok, on a spectacular quest through their childhood in the Forest and an unlikely stint on reality TV. Navigating those twin horrors, along with wormholes and time loops, Corey learns--the hard way--the difference between a prize and a gift. Following the Goldsmiths Prize-winning Sterling Karat Gold, Isabel Waidner's bold and buoyant new novel is about coming into one's own, the labor of love, the tendency of history to repeat itself, and what ensues when a large amount of cultural capital is suddenly deposited in a place it has never been before.

Sterling Karat Gold is Kafka's The Trial written for the era of gaslighting - a surreal inquiry into the real effects of state violence on gender-nonconforming, working-class and black bodies.

Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize

Fjollbjäfs är en glittrande värld befolkad av GuldSeXUella StatyEtter, antidragkings, frifräsardetektiver, lesbiska par som påminner om Gilbert & George, en transarmé utrustad med hjälmar i form av frågetecken och husdjur som det skriker flata om.I det socialistiska Storbritannien ska en tv-serie göras, men alla karaktärer och figuriner lägger sig i intrigen. Ingen har kontroll. Och självfallet inträffar överraskningar: En pseudovetenskaplig studie leder till faktiska resultat. Ett digitalt experiment blir viralt. Hundratals läppstiftsmärken återupplivar en döende kropp.Förtrollande, hysteriskt och skrävlande iscensätter Fjollbjäfs vad som sker när de rättighetsberövade tar kommandot. Packet styr allt och packet gör skillnad. Isabel Waidner har kallats för det queera avantgardets framtid och hens romaner har prisat med bland annat Goldsmith Prize, Republic of Conciousness Prize och det tyska priset till Årete bästa roman i översättning. Hen är också musiker i bandet Klang och initiativtagare till föreläsningsserien Queers Read i London.