Micah Nemerever, in conversation with Peter Kispert - These Violent Delights

Recorded September 15, 2020
Buy The Book: www.thirdplace...
An O Magazine.com LGBTQ Book That Is Changing the Literary Landscape in 2020 - An Electric Lit Most Anticipated Debut of the Second Half of 2020 - A The Millions Most Anticipated Book of the Year - A Paperback Paris Best New LGBTQ+ Books To Read This Year Selection
The Secret History meets Lie with Me in Micah Nemerever's compulsively readable debut novel--a feverishly taut Hitchcockian story about two college students, each with his own troubled past, whose escalating obsession with one another leads to an act of unspeakable violence.
When Paul enters university in early 1970s Pittsburgh, it's with the hope of moving past the recent death of his father. Sensitive, insecure, and incomprehensible to his grieving family, Paul feels isolated and alone. When he meets the worldly Julian in his freshman ethics class, Paul is immediately drawn to his classmate's effortless charm.
Paul sees Julian as his sole intellectual equal--an ally against the conventional world he finds so suffocating. Paul will stop at nothing to prove himself worthy of their friendship, because with Julian life is more invigorating than Paul could ever have imagined. But as charismatic as he can choose to be, Julian is also volatile and capriciously cruel, and Paul becomes increasingly afraid that he can never live up to what Julian expects of him.
As their friendship spirals into all-consuming intimacy, they each learn the lengths to which the other will go in order to stay together, their obsession ultimately hurtling them toward an act of irrevocable violence.
Unfolding with a propulsive ferocity, These Violent Delights is an exquisitely plotted excavation of the depths of human desire and the darkness it can bring forth in us.
Micah Nemerever studied art history and queer theory at the University of Connecticut, where he wrote his MA thesis on gender anxiety in the art of the Weimar Republic. He is a prolific home chef and an avid amateur historian of queer cinema. He lives in Seattle, Washington.
Peter Kispert is the author of the short story collection I Know You Know Who I Am (Penguin Books, February 2020). His fiction and nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming in GQ, Esquire, Playboy, Electric Literature's Recommended Reading, them, the Carolina Quarterly, Slice, and elsewhere. He lives in New York.

[@sm1616]

great interview!!! micah is an incredibly talented author!!!!! i cant wait for his future books they are just going to get me in the gut!!

[@josejones246]

I would've been all wrapped up in Paul's antics cause I truly didn't see him until like the last 10 chapters 😧😧

[@luiiiandmovieee]

such a great interview! Very thought out and deep just like the book itself