Q&A: Richard Porter, Pilot Press
I think there’s a huge surge in the popularity of what is called “queer” literature at the moment, but I think that it is a selective interest, operating within a narrow framework. You only have to take a look at the shelves of an LGBT+ section in a bookshop to see the vibrant colours and attention-grabbing designs, what a friend calls ‘Bubble Tea covers’, to get a feel of what parameters the big publishers are working within. My Dead Book is hardcore. It’s intense and unrelenting in its despair. I can see how it didn’t find an audience at larger presses.
Richard Porter of Pilot Press interviewed by 3:AM’s Fiction Editor, Daniel Davis Wood.
Shane
Shane’s clothes were more sealant than fabric—sprayed on, shiny finish. He wore them like the hard shell of a toy animated to life by others’ imaginations. I was more like a hologram, a cheap illusion. He told stories about yearning to be tough, scraping his knuckles on cement until they bled, cultivating calluses and rough spots, the pride he took in scars, lowering his voice and moving his mouth less beneath a slit-eyed gaze. We were alike. Both of us shot into the world still marked by our makers like bullets streaked by their barrels. And we had collided.
Read an extract from Nate Lippens’ My Dead Book.