“May you live in interesting times” is a curse I’ve thought about often, especially in the context of reading. Who am I if I retreat to the fantasy of the page when so much of the world around me is suffering? I don’t know how to answer that question other than, ironically, seeking out books and authors with possible answers. Luckily Aurora Mattia is an author capable of splitting open the world as we know it and turning it over with fresh, unflinching sight so we can look at it anew.
Aurora Mattia’s Unsex Me Here (Nightboat Books, 2025) is an experimental tapestry of short fictions that weave back on themselves like fairy tales. Not fairy tales as in Disney princesses with fanciful love stories, but fairy tales as in the far older tradition with hunger, need, violence, and plenty of sex. There’s nothing that can’t happen in these pages — no character is too bold, no symbol too sacred. The impossible is possible and ever in question. Mattia writes that as she approached this book, “I was trying to find a way to live in the world by imagining other worlds — I was trying, in one story after another, to make a paradise.”
What paradise does she make here? These stories will have you moving between a secret oasis cuddled up with the daughters of a Greek goddess to a motel room off the highway experimenting with stolen pharmaceutical drugs not ready for human consumption. There are mermaids and oracles, secret waterfalls and unusual altars in empty cathedrals. There is star-crossed, complicated love and trans-femme joy. There is a prophet who eats opals to chitchat with orchids, and orchids who speak in the language of perfumes. And still, no summary could do these compact wonders justice.
There is an epic form of mythmaking at work in these pages. From the characters of ancient Greece to biblical references, Mattia constantly turns over familiar symbols and stories and refreshes them, inviting classic symbols to interact with modern staples like Juuls and the J train. These symbols fold back on themselves for a brilliantly layered effect. In the included interview, “The Revelation of the Seed,” Mattia reflects on her writing style with this in mind: “Unsexing is what happens when I as a transsexual am understood not as basically a man or a woman, but as a particular affect in a particular instant — the affect does not refer back to a stabilized state of sex, but creates an instantaneous atmosphere…. Which might explain the prevalence, in my writing, of kaleidoscopes.” The kaleidoscope is a beautiful way to capture the feeling of Mattia’s work. Views through a kaleidoscope are not static, but fluid and multi-layered. How a symbol is viewed in her stories will change with the turning of the lens, and the effect is an observational wonder.
Along the way, Mattia’s prose is nothing short of wondrous — she polishes entirely mundane actions into gems. Her sentences are often baroquely adorned, and this makes for a sensory rich reading experience. Reading Mattia feels like eating a pomegranate from an underworld ruled not by Hades but by Persephone — there is work involved, but no trick to trap you this time. The work will be worth it, and the underbelly of each story is sweet.
Through her layered approach, Mattia invites us to complicate and reexamine our relationship to beauty, gender, religion, and memory, and she leans into this with her structural choices, too. Throughout the book, Mattia elected to mark her stories with the season, location, and year where she worked on them. Mattia also includes an author’s note and pair of interview transcripts where she elaborates on her process, the origins of these stories, and locates them on her personal journey towards meaning making. This book includes stories that were shaped before Mattia’s first novel, The Fifth Wound — a work of autofiction that follows her gender transition, violence, medical trauma, and a queer romance. But Unsex Me Here tracks Mattia’s journey across and beyond — some of the stories here predate her novel, some are a salve to the wounds, others are the fruit of fresh experimentation.
As a writer myself, I found the transparency of her process to be a gift in and of itself. It allows me to see how Mattia’s questions around selfhood, beauty, and memory shift and grow over time. She says in her author’s note, “My obsessions at nineteen were not so different from my obsessions at twenty-nine. These are stories about attempting to outrun time; about trying to remember trans-femme pasts; about magic touching everything except the possibility of lasting love.” Tracking Mattia’s journey in stories presented an unexpected metafiction element I wasn’t anticipating, but I was surprisingly eager to puzzle through. I found myself constantly flipping back through the pages to compare whether a recurring image or thematic element in one story was written earlier or later than another version of it. I loved placing the stories beside the personal context she volunteers in the interviews. Tracking her symbols and work through time acted as a constant reminder that ideas can be constantly revisited and revised. Who said we can’t redefine our world? Who said we can’t demand better?
Aurora Mattia is no stranger to this tension, and she is perhaps uniquely tuned to the importance of it. Part of what drew me to this book was learning that Mattia had pulled the book from her original publisher as an act of protest and solidarity. The initial publisher, Coffee House Press, was petitioned by nearly seventy of their authors in support of Palestine, and when the Press declined to even issue an acknowledgement of the ongoing atrocities and genocide, Mattia shifted publishers to Nightboat Books. An author principled enough to demand her work finds a home with a publisher that matches her values intrigued me. Little did I know that her work would be such a remarkable place to take shelter.
We do live in interesting times. Who can doubt that this era will become the stuff of history? But it’s books like Unsex Me Here that ground me in hope. Mattia quotes Ruth Wilson Gilmore in her postscript as saying: “What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities.” Unsex Me Here embodies that spirit. The story we’re writing now doesn’t need to be the same one we’ve read before. We are capable of inventing new myths. Choosing our own heroes. We’re in the thick of history making, which I don’t wish on anyone. But it also means we have the chance to remake the world, and in the style of Aurora Mattia, perhaps one of these days, we’ll make a paradise at last.
