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Read a sample from the book.
Like Shards of Rainbow Frolicking in the Air collects three early and one new story by L. Timmel Duchamp. The Tiptree/Otherwise Award Honor list story “Motherhood, Etc.,” explores gender issues through a nineteen year-old’s defiant challenge to medical authorities determined to control their body and contain their sexual difference. Another Tiptree/Otherwise Honor List story, “Welcome, Kid, to the Real World,” explores the grip that sexual dimorphism presented as an either/or choice has on a culture offering a seemingly limitless menu of choices to young adults. In “The Last Nostalgia,” Daisy Q seeks to map the City, a territory lying between the Real World and the Excellent World, home to poets and mathematicians. And finally, in “When Joy Came to the World,” a USian graduate student doing archival research in Florence experiences the joys of mass hedonism following a mysterious snowfall in the Arno.
Read L. Timmel Duchamp's essay, "What We're Fighting For," discussing
her reason for publishing the collection now.
Reviews
[Duchamp's]concern with epistemic violence is born out in the pages
of this collection. The antagonists of these stories are often, in the
words of one character, “dying to remove everything they think doesn’t
belong there.” That three of the book’s four stories were originally
published in the 1990s does not dilute their applicability today; if
anything, they show how deeply rooted our current battles really
are....
Duchamp says that “When Joy Came to the World” is a story about “the destabilization of capitalism that results when pleasure and joyosity take priority over unquestioned routine and commerce.” It’s an appealing vision, particularly at a time when unquestioned routine and commerce feel as hegemonic as they have ever been. Because if the Trump administration is right, and the episteme can be radically transformed by applying sufficient pressure … what is to stop us from transforming it ourselves? Like Shards of Rainbow Frolicking in the Air offers four visions of pleasure in political, social, and biological change. In doing so, it presents a welcome pick-me-up in a reactionary wasteland. (Read the whole review)
—Strange Horizons, William Shaw, Dec 1, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-61976-276-3 (13 digit)
Publication Date: Jun 2025
paperback 160 pages
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