Isabel Waidner’s first novel is a short, ferocious and deliciously weird work of queer experimental fiction that won't stop thrashing.
Detectives, anti-drag kings, trans armies, altered bodies, improbable animals, television production and art-world detritus collide inside a language. Waidner borrows from avant-garde writing, queer theory, camp, performance and slapstick, but the result never really settles into any of them. Even the book’s epigraphs—from Donna Haraway and Jack Spicer—announce the problem early: who or what gets counted as an actor, a body, a subject, a possible life.
The novel’s political imagination comes through its refusal of stable categories. Gender, species, identity and narrative authority are treated as things continually being assembled and interfered with rather than simply represented. Characters switch registers and forms; invented cultural artefacts begin generating consequences of their own; satire keeps mutating, but beneath the maximal silliness is a serious proposition about cultural power.
A genuinely odd little landmark of the contemporary queer avant-garde, and the beginning of the fictional body of work that would later include We Are Made of Diamond Stuff, Sterling Karat Gold and Corey Fah Does Social Mobility. Waidner lists Gaudy Bauble as their 2017 debut novel.
Dostoyevsky Wannabe Originals, 2017. First edition. Paperback. Light shelf and handling wear to covers, with slight rubbing and minor corner wear. Internally clean and unmarked; binding firm. Very good condition.
