Have you ever engaged in totally normal male behavior like:

Stealing porn magazines?
Hooking up with guys on Grindr?
Attempting to work in an open-pit mine despite having no relevant job experience?
Crossdressing as a woman?
Attending Gnostic Mass?
Running for government office?

Then this is a book for you!

It is definitely not a deeply felt collection of transsexual short stories, engaged in dissident metaphysical investigation of the normative tenets of gender in our society! Bro, how could you say that? It is very dramatic and exciting, yes, but it is not metaphysical at all. In fact, it is Realistic Fiction.

As if Charlie Chaplin re-wrote the works of Kafka, and he was a Russian trans man, Anton Solomonik brings a funny, heartbreaking, and startlingly unique new voice to contemporary short fiction.

PRAISE FOR REALISTIC FICTION

"Anton Solomonik’s stories are mordant, caustic, unyielding and outrageously funny. As they sound the endless ad absurdum of the human condition - human selves inside their given human bodies, like either of ‘em or not - and as they unceremoniously toss every stripe of piety, conformism, and posturing straight into the acid bath - they reverberate with a brilliant and steadfast, backhanded humanism. That is to say, Realistic Fiction is a grand and electrifying read.”
—Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Tinkers

"What does it mean to be understood? My heart overflows at this long-awaited story collection, which blends Sonic the Hedgehog aesthetics with the exacting interior investigations of a trans Thomas Mann, and which answers that question through unforgettable narrators who passionately strive to become less than they are, and who fail."
—Jeanne Thornton, Lambda Award-winning author of Summer Fun and A/S/L 

"If you like your prose freaky, your filth ambivalent, your millennial transes confused, and your gloomy irony served with a soupçon of glamorous ideological danger, I have the book for you. Anton Solomonik’s Realistic Fiction is irresistible. I’m a fan!"
—Andrea Lawlor, Whiting Award-winning author of Paul Takes The Form of a Mortal Girl

"There is nobody doing it like Anton. I cannot wait to hear what people make of this collection of freaks (deeply complimentary)."
—Tuck Woodstock, host of Gender Reveal

"Anton Solomonik's Realistic Fiction refuses to be normal. This truly original collection of short stories delights with disorienting humor, fascinating characters, and the enthusiastic plumbing of masculinity's many mysteries, from local politics to cross-dressing to Magic: The Gathering. Low affect yet high-fidelity, Fiction is giving Thomas Bernhard meets Dennis Cooper meets, I wanna say, Robert Walser? (While we're comparing, it's rare to find short stories as tightly moving as the Borgesian "August, 1962.")
—Davey Davis, author of X

"Anton Solomonik brings us into an uncanny valley of human interaction spiked with gender, philosophy, sex, and death; with the purity of unpaid labor in Boron mines and plenty of anxious self-reflection. It's reality broken up and viewed through a post-internet refraction. Finally, trans fiction as strange as trans life."
—Calvin Gimpelevich, Lambda Award-nominated author of Invasions

ABOUT ANTON SOLOMONIK

Anton Solomonik is a writer and illustrator living in Brooklyn, NY. He’s the co-host of the World Transsexual Forum, an open mic series for trans writers. His work has been described as "whimsical, yet heavy-handed.”

PRODUCT DETAILS

Publication Date: April 1, 2025

ISBN: 978-1-736716-88-5

Page Count: 244

Dimensions: 5.5” x 7”