Queer stories about love, loneliness, the surreal, and the self

The stories in Tell Me feature queer men of various ages reckoning with loneliness, selfishness, and the struggle for self-discovery and identity. In “The Vanisher,” a young bisexual man struggling with his own desire to be seen receives a bandana that allows him to become invisible. In “Retreat,” a widower travels to an artists’ colony to seek an audience with his recently deceased husband. And in “We Are Rendered Silent,” people lose their ability to speak when a man they love dies. Through Baumann’s inventive employment of the strange and surreal, these stories set out to explore the bizarre and often confounding experience of navigating modern-day queerness. With his unique voice and magnificent imagination, Baumann fully immerses readers in the queer experience.
 

JOE BAUMANN is the author of the short story collections Sing with Me at the Edge of Paradise, The Plagues, Where Can I Take You When There’s Nowhere to Go, and Hot Lips, and the novels I Know You’re Out There Somewhere and Lake, Drive. His fiction and essays have appeared in Third Coast, Passages North, Phantom Drift, and many others. 

“Like the act of turning a crystal in sunlight, this sharp collection prismatically throws unexpected and beautiful angles, illuminating with grace the lives of queer characters grappling with grief, belonging, desire, a shifting sense of identity, and the ways we are transformed by love. Baumann contributes, with his own style and sensibility, to the larger conversation of what it means to be a queer person in the world today, when equality looks more complicated than abstract notions of capital-P Progress, because freedom has to do with our messy, unreliable, unrelenting hearts.” —Peter Kispert, author of I Know You Know Who I Am — -