Growing up queer in the deep South, Genevieve Hudson has to build an archive of literary heroes to understand stories like her own Literary Nonfiction. Growing up queer in the deep South, Genevieve Hudson longed for stories about lives like her own. So she turned to Alison Bechdel's groundbreaking graphic memoir, FUN HOME. In its panels, she found sly references to Bechdel's personal influences. A Little in Love with Everyone is Hudson's journey down a rabbit hole of queer heroes like Audre Lorde, Eileen Myles, and Adrienne Rich, who turned their stories into art and empowered future generations to embrace their own truths. This book is part of a new series from Fiction Advocate called Afterwords. "I adore this book."—Karla J. Strand

A Little in Love with Everyone: Alison Bechdel's FUN HOME (...AFTERWORDS)

Literature & Fiction

Hudson, Genevieve

History & Criticism

Fiction Advocate

Boys of Alabama: A Novel

In this bewitching debut novel, a sensitive teen, newly arrived in Alabama, falls in love, questions his faith, and navigates a strange power. While his German parents don't know what to make of a South pining for the past, shy Max thrives in the thick heat. Taken in by the football team, he learns how to catch a spiraling ball, how to point a gun, and how to hide his innermost secrets.Max already expects some of the raucous behavior of his new, American friends--like their insatiable hunger for the fried and cheesy, and their locker room talk about girls. But he doesn't expect the comradery--or how quickly he would be welcomed into their world of basement beer drinking. In his new canvas pants and thickening muscles, Max feels like he's "playing dress-up." That is until he meets Pan, the school "witch," in Physics class: "Pan in his all black. Pan with his goth choker and the gel that made his hair go straight up." Suddenly, Max feels seen, and the pair embarks on a consuming relationship: Max tells Pan about his supernatural powers, and Pan tells Max about the snake poison initiations of the local church. The boys, however, aren't sure whose past is darker, and what is more frightening--their true selves, or staying true in Alabama.Writing in verdant and visceral prose that builds to a shocking conclusion, Genevieve Hudson "brilliantly reinvents the Southern Gothic, mapping queer love in a land where God, guns, and football are king" (Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks). Boys of Alabama becomes a nuanced portrait of masculinity, religion, immigration, and the adolescent pressures that require total conformity.

United States

Liveright

Product Description 
A “soul-stirring debut,” Boys of Alabama tells the “bewitching” (Michelle Hart, O, The Oprah Magazine) tale of sixteen-year-old Max’s first year in America.\n“Daring, unusual . . . and startlingly fresh” (Don Noble, Alabama Public Radio), Boys of Alabama announced Genevieve Hudson’s place in the canon of the southern gothic alongside Donna Tartt and Harper Lee. Newly arrived in Alabama, Max falls in love, questions his faith, and navigates a strange power. Although his German parents don’t know what to make of a South pining for the past, shy Max thrives after being taken in by the football team. But when he meets fishnet-wearing Pan in physics class, they embark on a quixotic, consuming relationship. Writing in “prose that is always imaginative and sensual” (Sarah Neilson, Believer), Hudson offers a complex portrait of masculinity, religion, immigration, and the adolescent pressures that require total conformity. 
 Amazon.com Review 
 This coming of age story is dreamlike in the best way: each character feels real even as the story itself is strange – not least because the main character, teenage Max, has the ability to bring birds and plants back to life. He sees his power of resurrection as another unwelcome boundary between him and other kids, a borderline addiction, even, since he craves the sharp hit of sweetness –lilac crunch, wet raspberries – from each soul he tastes by placing it back. 
When Max’s parents move the family from Germany to Alabama for a job in the auto industry, shy, gay Max embraces the South wholly: the breath-stealing heat, the intimacy of group prayer, the larger-than-life personalities, and the effortless friendship of the football team he joins. As Max’s relationship deepens with a femme boy named Pan, so does his fascination with a dangerous and charismatic local strain of Christianity. The adults are harboring as many secrets as the teenagers, and the book explores how emotional vulnerability and physical brutality carry equal power to hurt. Simple sentences, subtly shifted diction, and the suppleness of POV that comes from not using quotation marks make this story difficult to put down and genuinely unique. A beautifully inscribed invitation to see masculinity, the American South, and even God through fresh eyes, suggesting that what most defines us is what we celebrate and mourn. —Katy Ball 
 Review 
Boys of Alabama brilliantly reinvents the Southern Gothic... An absolutely magical novel.--Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks\nBoys of Alabama perfectly captures the magic and inevitable heartache of young lust.--Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light\n[Depicts] a brand of Southern-fried masculinity that is immediately recognizable and startlingly fresh. This is an exquisite book.--Nick White, author of How to Survive a Summer\nA gripping, uncanny, and queer exploration of being a boy in America, told with detail that dazzles and disturbs.--Michelle Tea, author of Against Memoir\nGenevieve Hudson creates a new American erotics of longing and belonging, flush with want and desire, hope and home, translation and transformation.--Matt Bell, author of Scrapper\nGenevieve Hudson dismantles and spins a new category of fairy tale for us, one that's equal parts dirt and splendor. A glinting, dark beauty. An incantation.--T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girl\nHudson goes right to a place where violence comes from--uncomfortably close to desire for magic, God, sex, whatever might actually heal us--and doesn't turn away.--Kristin Dombek, author of The Selfishness of Others\nOne of the finest--and weirdest!--first novels I've read in quite some long time.--Tom Bissell, author of Apostle and coauthor of The Disaster Artist\nReminds us that behind so many of America's most rigid beliefs lies the lonely human heart: twitchy, slippery, alive.--Mikkel Rosengaard, author of The Invention of Ana\nThis novel is a love song to outsiders of all

In her debut collection of stories, Pretend We Live Here, Genevieve Hudson explores the idea of home and what it means to find one: in the body, in the world, in other people. Her characters are seekers, whose actions are influenced by their slippery identities and by the strange landscapes that surround them.
In "Boy Box," a young woman yearns to test her luck with a wild punk girl crush. In "God Hospital," a character journeys deep into the woods of Alabama in search of an infamous religious healer, hoping he can fix her teeth. In "Adorno," someone in need of forgiveness crosses paths with a band of radical vegan activists and gets subsumed into their world. In "Dance!," a recluse writes a breakthrough song for her pink dolphin, but the song's success only drives her further away from society. Set in Amsterdam, the Pacific Northwest, and the Deep South, these stories hum with sexual tension, queerness, displacement, longing, humor, and dark nostalgia.
"A terrific collection of stories. There are echoes here of Flannery O'Connor, Barry Hannah, and Denis Johnson, but Genevieve Hudson is her own writer--impressively and gloriously so. Her eye for the clinching detail is unnerving and her sympathies are fascinatingly conflicted. I hope, and suspect, this book will be the start of a long and inspiring career." -Tom Bissell, author of The Disaster Artist and Magic Hours 
"In Pretend We Live Here, characters bleed and breathe with a caustic energy that dares the reader to keep pace as they are taken from the Deep South to Western Europe and back again. Genevieve Hudson is a new, coming-of-age voice that spotlights rural America, injecting it with a queer freshness that makes her writing impossible to forget." -Jing-Jing Lee, author of How We Disappeared
Genevieve Hudson is also the author of A Little in Love with Everyone (Fiction Advocate, 2018), a book on Alison Bechdel's Fun Home. Her writing has been published in Catapult, Hobart, Tin House online, Joyland, Vol.1 Brooklyn, Split Lip, The Collagist, No Tokens, Bitch, The Rumpus, and other places. Her work has been supported by the Fulbright Program and artist residencies at the Dickinson House, Caldera Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Portland State University, where she occasionally teaches Fiction Writing and Gender Studies courses.

Pretend We Live Here

Short Stories & Anthologies

Future Tense Books

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Books by Hudson, Genevieve

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hudson, Genevieve. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

A Little in Love with Everyone: Alison Bechdel's FUN HOME (...AFTERWORDS)

Boys of Alabama: A Novel

Boys of Alabama: A Novel

Pretend We Live Here