Poet Billy-Ray Belcourt has already transformed the memoir form, remaking it—strange, fresh, and new, in A History of My Brief Body. He does something similarly unexpected with his first novel, A Minor Chorus. Deeply aware of the history of the novel, of the sociopolitical forces that shaped what we consider a novel today, a form whose limitations, according to Belcourt, can’t accommodate the reality of an indigenous queer life, this novel is both about the searching for a new form (and a new way of living) and a very example of it. Scholarly and sexual, joyful and citational, embodied and theoretical, A Minor Chorus is somehow a polyvocal narrative of self-making (and unmaking), written for the future, that arrives to us, a new form, as if from the future.

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Here is today’s Bookshop with all of Belcourt’s books and most of the books mentioned today, from Saidiya Hartman to José Esteban Muñoz to Judith Butler.

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