Crawl: Stories

Delsohn debuts with a dryly humorous and poignant collection featuring an eclectic cast of characters navigating trans life in 2010s Seattle. The title entry sees 26-year-old warehouse worker Jack wondering if he’ll ever find love. Having struck out after a night of barhopping, he winds up at a bathhouse where he knows he can at least find sex. After the college student protagonist of “All Time Low” is left by her girlfriend for a trans man, she begins dating Julie, a self-identified “straight girl” who makes her feel “disgusting.” In “Same Old,” trans man Simon’s weekend acid trip is interrupted by a “cry for help” in the form of a voicemail from the recently transitioned Harold, his sister’s drug dealer, a “friendless, baby-trans burner who felt stuck in the wrong world, the wrong life.” Aware that others mock Harold and routinely call him by his dead name, and increasingly worried about his well-being, Simon reluctantly sets out to check on him. Throughout, the stories’ bold sex scenes often give way to humor, as in “Sex Is a Leisure Activity,” when the narrator, a transmasculine comedian, confesses his ignorance about the purpose of a cock ring; or vulnerable emotions, as when Jack convinces himself he’s experiencing love while having sex with a stranger. These exacting stories seethe with blunt honesty. Agent: Audrey Crooks, Trident Media Group. (Oct.)