Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Boy Oh Boy is a collection of queer fabulist stories and flash fictions told via second person, asking readers to share Doss’s explorations of joy and longing. Your boyfriend is many boyfriends, possibly all the boyfriends you’ve ever had or will have. But you must ask yourself whether you have them or they have you. Your boyfriend plays jokes on you—plays jokes on the world. He is forever unattainable, and still you love your boyfriend, even when it hurts you. Doss explores how relationships can be all-consuming, how we transform ourselves to fit within their contour. Eventually, you might change so much that you don’t even fit inside your own body. This book is so much about space—the physical, emotional, and mental spheres that everyone inhabits. Doss uses humor to deal with the isolation that each of us experiences—not because we’re alone, but because we’ve become detached from ourselves, our needs, and our desires. Boy Oh Boy is our chance to understand Zachary Doss, as well as our strangest selves.
"Playful, wistful, lustful, and liminal, Zachary Doss' Boy Oh Boy proves much larger than the sum of its parts. Doss explores the queerness of love, and how that love permeates—even in its absence—all parts of our lives. The boys (and boyfriends) of the collection may be mechanically replaceable, or miniature and multiple, or complicated in a dozen other ways, but they come to full life in Doss' stories. The shortest of these stories have a kind of effervescent charm that only increases the deeper you get into the collection. It's boys all the way down." —Kelly Link, 2018 AWP Award Series Winners Judge for Short Fiction
"While the stories are imbued with surrealism, there is also seriousness at work here. Each story is a kaleidoscope of the love, joy, longing, and loss we experience in relationships. Doss delves into the turbid waters of our desires and the discoveries we make about ourselves in relationships. In many ways, Boy Oh Boy is an exploration of the mirrored self that exists in any relationship – how we see ourselves and, in turn, how we are seen." —Alan Baumel, Southern Review of Books
"Doss uses humor to deal with the isolation that each of us experiences—not because we’re alone, but because we’ve become detached from ourselves, our needs, and our desires. Boy Oh Boy is our chance to understand Zachary Doss, as well as our strangest selves." —Tucker Lieberman, Independent Book Review