Frot the World by Fer Boyd

Frot the World plays lavishly serious games that wobble and swirl in daring fictions of ecstatic invention.
— Penny Goring

In this short fiction collection haphazardly spanning a biblical week, the turning points of our present world are held up to the light for questioning by animals, humans, and everything in-between. On Friday, a cabal of boozing jesters in a piss-soaked pub garden wonder if mystery will ever become trendy again, while on Tuesday a pack of bloodthirsty butterflies stake out a writer’s apartment during a red dust storm and discover the limits of optimism. Mid-week, teens resignify the commodities that populate their days in a Northeastern coastal town, where Impulse is not a body spray but a revolutionary instinct. Over at a local recycling plant on a Monday nightshift, inevitability is re-weaponised away from the powers of evil, before finally, on Sunday, an uncooperative chorus of organs discuss how to handle the snaking ouroboros of denial and prediction faced by the living. Through conversations fuelled by pulsating objects and tragic comedy, 'Frot the World' presents hectically current fictions in which heads are dunked in and out of places and bodies, getting high off choosing to stay alive.

Cover: Paula Turmina, "Sun Worshippers", 2021 (detail)

Fer Boyd’s bodily theories and ecstatic narratives manifest in fiction, theory, sound and performance. In 2023 they won the The Space Crone Prize for speculative and science short fiction, awarded by Silver Press and The Ursula K Le Guin Literary Trust.

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