And Then the Gray Heaven by R.E. Katz eBook
Winner of the 2019 Dzanc Novella Prize
When Jules’s partner B passes away suddenly, the harsh neon Florida stripmall swamp of their early years in the foster care system returns to haunt them. Jules is separated from B during the last days of their life in the hospital and then exiled from their family mourning, causing them to reach a breaking point that shimmers into a big idea. As final tribute, Jules takes the small remainder of B’s ashes with them on a cross-country romp to each significant place B worked during their strange and inspired life as a diorama artist. Jules’s burial adventures bring with them a pastiche of new friends, old chosen family, and a golden heap of B’s stories, daisy-chained together in Jules’s own grief fugue.
This digital download includes .epub and .mobi files
Also available in print
Winner of the 2019 Dzanc Novella Prize
When Jules’s partner B passes away suddenly, the harsh neon Florida stripmall swamp of their early years in the foster care system returns to haunt them. Jules is separated from B during the last days of their life in the hospital and then exiled from their family mourning, causing them to reach a breaking point that shimmers into a big idea. As final tribute, Jules takes the small remainder of B’s ashes with them on a cross-country romp to each significant place B worked during their strange and inspired life as a diorama artist. Jules’s burial adventures bring with them a pastiche of new friends, old chosen family, and a golden heap of B’s stories, daisy-chained together in Jules’s own grief fugue.
This digital download includes .epub and .mobi files
Also available in print
Winner of the 2019 Dzanc Novella Prize
When Jules’s partner B passes away suddenly, the harsh neon Florida stripmall swamp of their early years in the foster care system returns to haunt them. Jules is separated from B during the last days of their life in the hospital and then exiled from their family mourning, causing them to reach a breaking point that shimmers into a big idea. As final tribute, Jules takes the small remainder of B’s ashes with them on a cross-country romp to each significant place B worked during their strange and inspired life as a diorama artist. Jules’s burial adventures bring with them a pastiche of new friends, old chosen family, and a golden heap of B’s stories, daisy-chained together in Jules’s own grief fugue.
This digital download includes .epub and .mobi files
Also available in print
praise
“A funeral band plays as Jules Baffa leads a procession of loved ones through all the stages of queer grief in mourning their beloved B. And Then the Gray Heaven is a novel held together by shared loss: its subtlety, rage, and conspiratorial tenderness. Jules makes their way to and through museums, in order to mix B’s ashes with the dust of institutions, and RE Katz reminds us that trans and queer folk have each other.” —Raquel Salas Rivera, author of lo terciario/ the tertiary and while they sleep (under the bed is another country)
"At once darkly hilarious and surprisingly heartbreaking, RE Katz's debut novel defies genre expectations just as its protagonists defy the gendered, artistic and relationship constructs that surround them. And Then the Gray Heaven reads like a series of pearls slipping off a necklace—a series of stories, images, moments, songs and poems that at first appear absurd, then shocking, then brilliant, then, finally, divine." —Steph Post, author of Miraculum, Lightwood, Walk in the Fire, Holding Smoke, and A Tree Born Crooked
“And Then The Gray Heaven is at once an art manifesto, heist, and road story. Here, the disorientation of grief has a surprisingly joyful orientation of its own. Katz lovingly crafts a diorama of queer kinship and artistic lineage: rendered in such detail it’s realer than the real thing. ” —Zach Ozma, co-editor of We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, 1961-1991
about the author
RE Katz exhibited Boywitch Codex: Hypertexts as February 2017 Artist in Residence at Dreamland Arts in Buffalo, NY. They work in educational justice and are interested in personal fashion, antifascist witchcraft, and television.
