Tricyclist
$25.49
- Paperback
144 pages
- Release Date
12 November 2026
Summary
The love child of The L Word and Brontez Purnell’s 100 Boyfriends, with a disaffected flair all its own.
It’s San Francisco in the early aughts, and Howie Song is floundering. His failed projects—as a professional ballet dancer, as a boyfriend, as a friend—have left him forever the “third wheel.” But maybe he likes it that way? Leaping wildly between lovers, centuries, and an ever-changing cultural landscape, Howie might just feel most himself in the fra…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781643623252 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 1643623257 |
| Author: | Joon Oluchi Lee |
| Publisher: | Nightboat Books |
| Imprint: | Nightboat Books |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 144 |
| Release Date: | 12 November 2026 |
| Dimensions: | 127mm x 203mm |
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Critics Review
“Set in San Francisco in the early 2000s, this poetic and sexy novel follows Howie, a perpetual third wheel who wants to be a ballet dancer and to find a boyfriend. With the help of a few suitors and supportive lesbians, he learns to stake his claim to a life of flamboyant beauty.”—Sophia June, Marie Claire
“This is a book about life and art in all its wonderful, imperfect strangeness.”—Rachel Brittain, Book Riot
“It was a pleasure to spend time with Howie as he immerses himself in the sights and rhythms of San Francisco at the turn of the millennium. Readers longing for a glimpse of this vanished world will certainly get their fix.”—Diane Josefowicz, The Providence Eye
“Between the fashion and the orgies, Tricyclist approaches a nouveau roman pitch of hungry abstraction… . [An] adventurous, ravenous novel.—Patrick Nathan, Dhimmi Monde
”[A] poetic, sexy novel.”—Language Arts
“Joon Oluchi Lee is one of my favorite writers. A quick-change artist with a blazing intellect, he startles with his wicked wit and mix of rawness and sophistication. In Tricyclist, vexed, sexed, and indexed types orbit the narrator Howie Song, offering all kinds of distractions and attractions. Identity is a flipbook of possibilities, malleable in a way that excites and also threatens dissolution (which is maybe a relief). Raunch, philosophical asides, and a scavenger hunt for connection and love are all propelled by Lee’s masterful maverick style and brilliant humor.”—Nate Lippens
“Across lush hangouts with friends and hookups with lovers, Joon Oluchi Lee’s Tricyclist paints shimmering portraits of the most beautiful blouses and bars and bodies laid bare alongside our hopelessly alluring narrator. Through Howie’s careening sex drives and death drives, sensuality is everything, and with Lee’s keen attunement to life’s viscera, Tricyclist aches gorgeously. What a rhapsodic balm to my 2026.”—Benedict Nguyễn
“Tricyclist is a sex-forward, strikingly original story of queer life in San Francisco that feels so fresh it left my fingers wet. Joon Oluchi Lee’s eye is as sharp as his prose, rendering characters and scenarios with gossipy frankness. Kinetic and true and hyper-alive.”—Michelle Tea
Joon Oluchi Lee
Joon Oluchi Lee lives and writes in femininity and feminism. He is the author of Tricyclist (Nightboat, 2026) and Neotenica (Nightboat, 2020), which won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction. Also the author of 94 (2015) and Lace Sick Bag (2013), as well as various essays on queer theory, feminism, and fiction writing, he is Professor in Literary Arts & Studies at Rhode Island School of Design, and, with his partner Roddy, co-parent of their rescue dogs Nella and Sami.
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