Lovetown | Granta

  • Published: 07/04/2011
  • ISBN: 9781846270529
  • 129x20mm
  • 240 pages

Lovetown

Michal Witkowski

Translated by William Martin

Growing up queer in a Communist state, queens Patricia and Lucretia spent the ’70s and ’80s underground, finding glamour in the squalor, strutting their stuff in parks and public toilets, seducing hard Soviet soldiers, preying on drunks and seeing their friends die of Aids. Today they’re about to hit Lovetown, a homo-haven, populated by a younger generation of emancipated gays, who are out and proud in their post-Communist paradise: suntanned, sculpted and vigorously spending the pink euro.This is the story of the clash between old and new gays – the clapped out queens and the flashy fags – as they meet in a place where anything goes, but some things have also been lost.

This hilarious, scabrous, sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued (and brilliantly translated) novel is essentially and life-enhancingly political - if by politics we mean who gets to live, and how. Treat yourself; buy it

Neil Bartlett, Guardian

A fascinating look at how the darkness of communism may have only given way to a blander, cosmopolitan life for all and sundry

Big Issue

The end of Soviet oppression wasn't good news for everyone. Patricia and Lucretia are relics of the pre-Solidarity, pre-Aids Polish gay scene, nostalgic about the old days of shame and secrecy ... The two old queens - as much outsiders in the new world as in the old - tell their stories of samizdat sex to a young gay journalist

Kate Saunders, The Times

The Author

Michal Witkowski was born in 1975 and is the author of a book of short stories, Copyright (2001). This is his first novel. He lives in Warsaw.

More about the author →

Michal Witkowski on Granta.com

Fiction | The Online Edition

Lovetown

Michal Witkowski

Discover Lovetown: a homo-haven in post-Communist Poland.