Housmans are delighted to be welcoming Alvina Chamberland to celebrate the publication of her hotly anticipated autofictional work Love the World Or Get Killed Trying.

Named a Most Anticipated Book in Nylon, Them, Ms. Magazine, Autostraddle, San Francisco Chronicle, Bay Area Reporter, LGBTQ-reads, and Write or Die-Magazine.

“Perhaps some hearts are so big they must constantly burst and break.”

Through playful poetic prose, sharp social commentary and self-deprecating gallows humor Love the World or Get Killed Trying dives into the mind of Alvina, a trans woman on the eve of turning 30. The reader is invited to follow her journey through the breathtaking wilderness of Iceland and busy city boulevards of Berlin and Paris as she probes questions of eternity, sexuality, longing, death, love, and how hard it is to remain soft when you’re a ceaseless target of straight men’s secret lust and open disgust. This novel tackles universal issues through a trans woman’s specific lens – insisting on these experiences speaking to far more than just issues of sexuality and gender.

Reaching its climax through an urgent wildfire scream-of-consciousness, cry-of-love-manifesto, Love the World or Get Killed Trying is a raw and vulnerable work of magical brutalist autofiction; abstract in the sense of poetically digging beneath the surface, and experimental in the sense of trying to find out new things and express them in new ways, while concretely asserting that if trans women one day collectively outed every man who seeks them out, a full-blown revolution would ensue by nightfall.

Alvina will read from the book and be in conversation with the brilliant Juliet Jacques, followed by an audience Q&A.

OUR SPEAKERS:

Alvina Chamberland is a Swedish-US American author of predominantly literary autofiction novels. In 2015 Bokförlaget ETC published her co-authored book Allt som är Mitt: Våldtäkt, Stigmatisering och Upprättelse (English translation: All that is mine: Rape, Stigmatization and Reparation). The book received a grant from the Swedish Arts Council. In September 2018 her novel Utelåst – Uppväxt- nostalgi för freaks (Locked Out – A nostalgic account of growing up for freaks) a parody of the coming of age-genre, was published by Dockhaveri Förlag. She resides between Athens and Berlin and has no real hobbies, only intensity and serenity. Love the World or Get Killed Trying is her English language debut.

Juliet Jacques (b. Redhill, Surrey in 1981) is a writer, filmmaker, broadcaster and academic based in London. She has published six books, including Trans: A Memoir (2015), two short story collections including Variations (2021), Front Lines: Trans Journalism 2007-2021 (2022), and a novella, Monaco (2023). Her fiction, journalism and essays have appeared in the Guardian (including her ‘Transgender Journey’ column, longlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2011), New York Times, Frieze, London Review of Books and many other publications; her short films have screened in galleries and festivals across the world. She teaches at the Royal College of Art and elsewhere, hosted the arts discussion programme Suite (212) on Resonance 104.4fm, and is a co-host of Novara FM. She has played football for Clapton Community FC, Horley Town and Surrey.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose book + event entry, your copy of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or have it delivered, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 7pm, Event Starts 7:15