Description
Village Book Club
"Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl" (2017) by Andrea Lawlor
with Marco Astolfi
It’s 1993. Paul Polydoris, a 23-year-old student, discovers that he is secretly capable of shapeshifting. He uses this ability to change his gender expression, sometimes for sexual purposes, while wandering across the United States. Amongst his many adventures, Paul has fun going out in Iowa City looking like the girl he would like to fuck, turns into a muscular bottom at a leather bar in Chicago and takes on the appearance of a femme lesbian named Polly to attend a music festival in Michigan.
The book, heavily influenced by the queer culture of the 90s, mixes the model of the picaresque novel with postmodern influences, utilizing footnotes and pastiche, with short fables interspersed throughout. The first draft began as a retelling of the Tiresias myth. The concept was also influenced by Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Marco Astolfi is a literature translator, a writer and a faerie from Italy. Based in Berlin, he co-hosts the Village Heart Circle for GBTQ men and the bi-monthly Book Club meetings. He’s a regular at the Creative Writing and can be found modelling occasionally for the Life Drawing Lessons. He attended the One Year Training in 2018 and facilitated the Cock O’Clock workshop at Easter Stretch 2019 and the Privates Talks at Stretch Imagine 2020.
About the Village Book Club
Book lovers and bookworms have been meeting on a bimonthly basis to discuss works of fiction and non-fiction (novels, biographies, and essays) focused on or related to GBTQ themes and personalities.
Anticipating insightful discussions, we choose the next book two months in advance.
The discussion will be conducted in English.
