Downloading Love/Aggression

Best friends Lily and Zoe fight, separate, reunite, and repeat, each time deepening the belief that the other is the source of their problems. Once Lily, a struggling tattoo apprentice, is exiled from their shared house, she bounces from an artist's fixer-upper, to a cult leader with a harem of subs, to a house shared with the goddess of transfemininity. Meanwhile, rising movie star Zoe becomes more cutthroat by the day in her relentless quest for fame.

If Lily can't give up her desire for control, if Zoe can't lay aside her cruelty and ego, they'll never escape their intolerable places in the world. Traversing art, domination, sex, and shape-shifting houses, LOVE/AGGRESSION is a novel about the indignity of depending on other people, and the terrible cost of trying not to.

"I devoured every page of this sharp-hearted, gently magical-realist parable about curdled friendships, queer house drama, and the terrible price one pays to be young, femme, and ascending. With this debut, June Martin opens good new roads for trans storytelling: she shows us fear in a handful of goddess dust." - Jeanne Thornton, author of Summer Fun

"A firecracker. June Martin bursts onto the scene with this surreal comic novel, a book with heart, soul, and viscera. She anatomizes a scene the way a Victorian doctor dissects a corpse, and just as thrillingly for the bystander; the organs are bold and strange. LOVE/AGGRESSION's picaresque opening gives you all the clues to its tightly machined finale, but you won't solve them. A debut to be reckoned with, by a writer you owe it to yourself to read." - Isaac Fellman, author of Dead Collections

"Funny, vicious, poignant, and breathlessly intelligent, Love/Aggression is a dirty delight and a staggeringly accomplished debut." - Gretchen Felker-Martin, author of Manhunt and Cuckoo