That Waidner delivers such moral clarity with nonstop wit and invention makes their novel not just an admirable achievement but a pleasure to read.”—Matt Bell, The New York Times Book Review
“Waidner’s novel is actually a strange collage, which performs much the same function as the performance art series that Sterling organizes: It destabilizes the notion of reality and conjures a ‘counternarrative’ to our oppressive sense of normality. . . . A rollicking good time.”—Charlie Jane Anders, The Washington Post
“[Waidner's] explosive sensibility and style are as far removed from mediocre prose and middle-class manners as you can imagine. This alone is reason to read them.”—Bernardine Evaristo, The New York Times Book Review
“This novel is part Franz Kafka, part Hieronymus Bosch, and part Monty Python, but mostly it’s completely sui generis. And it succeeds on every level a novel can. Dizzying, unsettling, and extremely smart.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“[A] daring masterpiece, messy and bizarre, yet precise and witty and brainy as something by an AFAB David Lynch, or a nonbinary Valerie Solanas or Kathy Acker born into an era that would actually listen to them. An era that needs this kind of wild and brilliant conjuring.”—Michelle Tea, LIBER: A Feminist Review
“Waidner’s refreshingly absurdist third novel . . . is a topsy-turvy journey across Camden Town from the point of view of a nonbinary migrant, a Kafkaesque adventure that encompasses bullfighters, footballers, time-traveling spaceships, and a high-drama trial.”—Michelle Hart, Electric Literature's “Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Books of Spring 2023”
“[Sterling Karat Gold] is strange, powerful, witty, kaleidoscopic and well, a bit deranged in all honesty . . . in only the best of ways.”—Karla J. Strand, Ms. Magazine
“A dizzying blend of ordinary and strange—[Sterling Karat Gold is] full of time travel, spaceships, and the everyday dilemmas of contemporary life.”—Laura Sackton, Book Riot
“Sterling Karat Gold's power comes from the wide-ranging creativity and openness of Waidner’s mind and their challenge not to leave art alone, daring us not to either. Daring us to trust our imagination, because the imagination is a weapon, too. So, too, is humor, which is why, in Waidner’s hands, the world the imagination creates is also funny. And so, too, is love—which abounds between Sterling and their friends.”—Jennifer Kabat, 4Columns
"[A] piece of winged originality."—Ali Smith, The Guardian (UK)
“Fearless, clever, and blazingly original, Isabel Waidner’s latest is a riotous parable of resistance in the key of Hieronymous Bosch. Sterling Karat Gold advances its searing indictment of injustice and hypocrisy with equal parts wit and guts—all the while honoring the joys of queer friendship and fashion-forward time travel. There’s nothing else like this in the world.”—Megan Milks
“Revelatory. This novel is a portal into our own world and the queer, migrant resistance that urgently reshapes it. It is an intervention into all the forces that keep us apart, and a call for us to use whatever means possible—including time travel—to stay together.”—Joss Lake, author of Future Feeling
“In neon, polyester, in ALL-CAPS-BLAZING-QUEER AESTHETICS, Waidner delivers a novel in which fiction finds itself refreshed—kitsch, urban, a kind of collage, assemblage. A glittering queer futurism that moves from album covers to spaceships, from bullfights to detention centers, Sterling Karat Gold interrogates whiteness, capitalism, and nationhood in language as witty as it is intelligent, as spoken as it is written. This novel made me homesick—I bought pastel trackies within the week.”—Lars Horn
★ 2022-12-24
A Londoner is the subject of a surreal trial in this kaleidoscopic novel.
Sterling Beckenbauer knows a thing or two about loss. “Lost my father to AIDS, my mother to alcoholism,” they reflect. “Lost my country to conservativism, my language to PTSD.” And after they’re set upon outside their flat in Camden Town in London by several bullfighters, they’re in danger of losing their freedom—while later, at a football match, they’re accosted by two police officers dressed as club officials who inform them that they’re being arrested for assaulting the bullfighters. (They later learn they’re also being charged with “forcing arresting officers to go to Hendon, Travel Zone 4, on a Saturday.”) The timing couldn’t be worse for Sterling, who’s just about to launch the latest installment of Cataclysmic Foibles—“a quarterly series of DIY artists’ plays”—with their “bestie,” Chachki Smok, a costume designer. Things then take a turn when Sterling learns that they’ll be allowed to stage the next play, but only if it also functions as their trial. And as for that trial, it’s presided over by a judge who’s “a tall, blue-bodied frog, spindly, with the head of a fledgling bird,” and the spectators include “a pig in a religious habit” and others with “frog-shaped white hearts beating in, or on, their funnel-shaped chests.” Add to all this a time-traveling doppelgänger, a spaceship, and a “PINK SPIRE WAKING UP APROPOS OF NOTHING AND COMING FOR ME WITH ITS CRUSTACEAN LIMBS AND ITS HAIR-FINE JETS,” and you have a novel that defies the laws of literary physics—Waidner seems incapable of not surprising their readers, and the novel, despite its serious themes, seems like it had to be incredibly fun to write. Still, it’s a sobering look at the way underrepresented communities—migrants, nonbinary people—are treated: “They know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a system poised against them; to be positioned as the aggressor, the danger, when having nothing, nothing, on the other side.” This novel is part Franz Kafka, part Hieronymus Bosch, and part Monty Python, but mostly it’s completely sui generis. And it succeeds on every level a novel can.
Dizzying, unsettling, and extremely smart.
