Name: Jeanne Thornton Presents: A/S/L
Start: 2025-04-07T18:30:00-04:00
End: 2025-04-07T19:30:00-04:00
Location: Bookbug & this is a bookstore

$Jeanne Thornton Presents: A\/S\/L$

Join us in welcoming Jeanne Thornton for the release of her new novel: A/S/L
About this Event

A deeply affective novel set at the crossroads of online nostalgia & trans identity, A/S/L is the bewitching, poignant, and capacious story of three queer friends, the video game they fail to make, and their transformative relationship that survives adolescence and obsolescence.
For fans of Emma Copley Eisenberg’s Housemates, Joss Lake’s Future Feeling, and the Final Fantasy franchise of video games, A/S/L is a profoundly evocative and brilliantly rendered novel of queer cyberspaces and contemporary trans life in America that simultaneously, imaginatively brings the technological and the spiritual together.
1998: Reclusive and obsessive-compulsive Sash, mercurial but unimaginably capable Abraxa, and anxiously closeted Lilith are three teenagers scattered across the country but joined by the Internet. They are making Saga of the Sorceress, the greatest independent video game of all time that will change everything, if only for the three of them.
Eighteen years later, Saga of the Sorceress still exists only on a floppy disk carried by one of its creators. Lilith works as a loan underwriter at a rinky-dink bank in Manhattan, a trans woman in a very cis world. Sash is in Brooklyn, working as a part-time webcam dominatrix. Neither knows that the other is in New York, or that Abraxa is just across the Hudson River, sleeping on the floor of a friend’s Jersey City home after a disaster at sea. They have never met in person, and have been out of touch for years, but none have forgotten the sorceress, or her quest, still far from finished. When Abraxa feels the stir of the sorceress who insists that the game resume, she sets in motion a series of events that will draw all three back into one another’s lives and force them to consider the secrets they shared, the joy they found, and the hurt they inflicted.
Thornton’s depiction of three distinct paths of life & survival forged by compelling, dimensional trans protagonists across different queer social circles and material realities is beautifully wrought with longing and regret, (re)connection and forgiveness. A/S/L threads the haunting specter of unrealized dreams and broken friendships with the redeeming powers of the art and technology that unforgettably, irreversibly shaped us.

Jeanne Thornton is the author of Summer Fun, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction and finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction, as well as The Black Emerald and The Dream of Doctor Bantam. Her fiction has appeared in n+1, WIRED, Evergreen Review, and other places. She is an editor at Feminist Press, as well as copublisher of Instar Books and coeditor of the Ignatz Award–winning We’re Still Here: An All-Trans Comics Anthology. She lives in Brooklyn, and more information is available at jeannethornton.com.