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Brian Alessandro has written for Interview magazine, Newsday, PANK, the Huffington Post, and recently adapted Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story into a graphic novel for Top Shelf Productions. 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. His new novel, Performer Non Grata, was just published by Rebel Satori Press.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
An insecure American narcissist moves his family to Madrid to buy his way into bullfighting and invites horror for everyone in so doing.
On your nightstand now:
My Year of Rest & Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers by YiYun Li, Demons by Dostoyevsky, and The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty.
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Complete Grimm's Fairytales.
Your top five authors:
Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Don DeLillo, and Mary Gaitskill. This list changes every few years, though Nabokov always remains.
Book you've faked reading:
Ulysses by James Joyce, but now I must read it because I am hosting a Culture Connection event about it in June for the Queens Public Library and need to fake being an expert.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Greenland by David Santos Donaldson. It's so damn inventive.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. The drawing of Howard Roark was hot.
Book you hid from your parents:
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller.
Book that changed your life:
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. I was 16 and it, along with Kubrick's film, made me want to write fiction and make films.
Favorite line from a book:
Very many, but here is one: "There is always something left to love," by Gabriel Gárcia Márquez from One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Five books you'll never part with:
Lolita by Nabokov, Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, White Noise by DeLillo, and The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. I was 19 and I never knew a book could do what it did.
What themes or topics does your new novel, Performer Non Grata, explore?
Hot-button issues of toxic masculinity, cancel culture, social media, gender roles, and the Western urge to relocate and reinvent. It is also largely about non-human animal cruelty and how that abuse and exploitation carry over into human cruelty. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Díaz calls Performer Non Grata "a madhouse novel."