A fast-paced, debut tragicomedy of manners written in verse about
queer (mostly trans) women that is funny, literary, philosophical,
witty, sometimes bitchy and sometimes heartbreaking.
Aashvi, Kate, Bette,
Keiko, Gaia, and Day are six queer, mostly trans women surviving and
thriving in Brooklyn. Visiting all the fixtures of fashionable 21st
century queer society--picnics, literary readings, health
conferences, drag shows, punk houses, community accountability
processes, Grindr hookups--The Call-Out also engages with
pressing questions around economic precarity, sexual consent, racism
in queer spaces, and feminist theory, in the service of asking what
it takes to build, or destroy, a marginalized community.
A novel written in
verse, The Call-Out recalls the Russian literary classic
Eugene Onegin, but instead of 19th century Russian aristocrats
who crudely solved their disagreements with pistols, the participants in
this rhyming drama have developed a more refined weapon, the online
call-out, a cancel-culture staple. In this passionate tangle of
modern relationships, where a barbed tweet can be as dangerous as the
narrator's bon-mots, Cat Fitzpatrick has fashioned a modern novel of
manners that gives readers access to a vibrant cultural underground.