Unsex Me Here

Aurora Mattia was born in Hong Kong and lives in Texas. Her first book, The Fifth Wound, was published by Nightboat Books. Her stories have appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, Prairie Schooner, SPASM, Joyland, and elsewhere; and also in exhibitions at the RISD Museum and the Renaissance society, accompanying portraits by Elle Pérez. She’s working on a new novel called Seven Come Eleven, and writing some country songs. She believes in a free Palestine and an end to ICE, from the Rio Grande to the Jordan River, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Mediterranean Sea.

"Mattia dazzles with this genre-spanning collection of stories about queer and trans characters navigating desire and love . . . Ripe with poetic metaphor, Mattia’s narratives blend reality, magical realism, and autofiction to create a fever dream of yearning. Readers will be enthralled."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review"For a lot of trans women, the aesthetic is a life-or-death matter, and in more ways than one. Her sentences are crammed with clauses, her clauses with glittering, gleaming objects, her objects adorned with modifiers, her modifiers with yet more modifiers.”—McKenzie Wark, e-flux"Aurora Mattia’s second novel, Unsex Me Here, named for the infamously ravenous line from Lady Macbeth, reads like a spellbook of surrealist transsexual musings."—Alexa Jo Berry, The Poetry Project Newsletter"Aurora is a brilliant, technical stylist—she writes baroque sentences . . . and evidently knows the laws of grammar well enough to break them, carefully and deliberately."—Louis Shankar, The Whitney ReviewI loved Aurora Mattia’s debut, The Fifth Wound, and her sophomore attempt is just as cutting and kaleidoscopic as her first. Filled with trans love and desire, this collection of stories spans time, metaphor and genre to make for an entrancing read.”—Ms. Magazine“[she has] turned her ravishing technique loose on the prose collection.”—Davey Davis, Shelf Awareness"This story collection sounds ethereal and haunted, blending realism, the speculative, and autofiction for a true genre-bending experience."—Autostraddle, "Our Most Anticipated Queer Books for April"“A fairy tale, in the classic, sparkling, and powerful ways."—Michelle Tea, author of Black Wave"Aurora Mattia writes from the point where passion, pleasure, and fury are transmuted into ecstatic vision. She intervenes into the perennial concerns of trans writing—how to confess without betraying, and how to resist the temptation to simplify experience to something coherent and false. These stories are ruptures in the taut skin of reality, but listen closely and you can hear the implacable, promiscuous mind of a trans woman of our era, trying again and again to break through to the real truth."—Emily Zhou, author of Girlfriends"With a favorite writer, there is a before and an after. Now I have read Aurora Mattia. These stories are so tender and cutting, almost mystical."—Amina Cain"The book shimmers across boundaries of self and sentence, coalescing into a shifting scent-thetics of post-identity. Like a scent, this poetics is immediate, limbic and limber, evading precise legibility and capture. This is what it is to observe identity's flickering marks on a world that would like to cage its vapor.”—Ari Moline, Cleveland Review of Books”One of the most intimate books I have ever read. Psychedelic and glittering with raw, tender emotion . . . Unsex Me Here connects the stories of transfeminine individuals across all of time and space. Reading this book is like experiencing the rapture from every angle. I can’t recommend it enough!”—Catherine Pabalate, Epilogue Books"[Unsex Me Here] will dazzle readers . . . a mystical, ethereal, and often emotional ride."—Jim Piechota, Bay Area Reporter"Mattia’s sentences expand and expand, with entirely new thoughts or memories opening up where one might expect a comma or period. . . prismatic."—Samuel Ernest, The Rearview"Mattia’s prose is lacquered and psychedelic. Her genius extends from antiquity into every future."—Charlie Jones, A Room of One's OwnPraise for The Fifth Wound“Aurora Mattia’s The Fifth Wound is a strange book in all the best ways. Baroque and mythical, interdimensional and grounded, this novel is an exploration of passion, beauty, violence and loss. Chocked full of winding, brilliant sentences sure to turn readers’ minds inside out, this is a tale of trans love and fantasy that engages with the full scope of the good, the frightening, and the profound.”—Isle McElroy, Vulture“In her new novel, Mattia reinvents the roman à clef with a magical realist memoir that puts the dusty genre of autofiction to shame. Sifting from multiple narratives—and dimensions—The Fifth Wound is a romance, a meditation on transphobic violence, and a speculative tale of time travel, ecstatic visionaries, and mystical union.”—Ed Simon, The Millions“The Fifth Wound contains some of the most deliriously, convulsively, terrifyingly beautiful writing I’ve ever seen. In the delicate, fleshy membrane of her prose, Mattia holds shards of pain, defiance, erudition, and above all passion—with all the biblical resonances of that word. The book is an astonishment.”—Barbara Browning, author of The Gift“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.”—Jennie Seidewand, Gulf Coast