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Who the hell is Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore?

The Austin Chronicle calls Mattilda "a cross between Tinkerbell and a honky Malcolm X with a queer agenda." The San Francisco Chronicle calls her "a gay provocateur." And BUTT Magazine calls her "ONE OF THE HUNDRED MOST INTERESTING PEOPLE ON EARTH."

The San Francisco Bay Guardian says Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore "kicks mainstream lit in the teeth," and Radical History Review says "Mattilda never backs down from a fight." But she also loves intimate conversations, so try her, okay?

Oh, but you want more information?

Mattilda's new novel, So Many Ways to Sleep Badly, has arrived in the world, yes your world -- order it here!

Here's what people are saying about So Many Ways to Sleep Badly:

"Profane meanderings..."
-- Publishers Weekly

"Unearths subjects still relatively untouched in popular culture... You're not going to be reading anything similar elsewhere."
-- Times of London

"Mattilda's brilliance makes stream-of-consciousness a lifestyle, a state-of-consciousness. This is an entire lived life's worth of heartshaking honesty, arch observation, searing vulnerabilty and craving and seeking, all in one breathtakingly poetic (and hilarious) book."
—Michelle Tea

"So Many Ways to Sleep Badly is a perfectly tidy mess, a ‘Sex in the Other City’—only these sexual escapades and flailing urges are truly transgressive and flamboyantly hilarious at every turn… This refreshingly frenetic and innovative second novel is unabashedly political, but without being formulaic or reductive. It is a book that has done nothing less than invent its own language.”
—T Cooper

"Like the best writers that have come before — David Wojnarowicz, Lou Reed, William S. Burroughs — Sycamore has boiled life and times down to a resin that you could almost grind, cut up and snort. There is no one else on this planet that could write this book. Dare I say it's a classic? Yes, and I dare you to read it."
—Jake Shears of Scissor Sisters

"Reading a chapter of this amazing book is like when someone throws you into the deep end and you don’t know how to swim. . . . You breathe in this new element—this frantic, fluid prose—and read like you have never read before."
—Rebecca Brown

"In 1955, City Lights published Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, an attack on the conformity and the alienation of that era. Now here’s another great paean to a counterculture of hustlers, junkies and visionary angels to wash the taste of the Bush years out of our mouths."
—Robert Glück

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is a writer, editor, activist, critic and troublemaker. Most recently, she is the editor of an expanded second edition of That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (Soft Skull 2008) and Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity (Seal 2007).

Mattilda's first novel is Pulling Taffy (Suspect Thoughts 2003), and she also edited Dangerous Families: Queer Writing on Surviving (Haworth 2004) and Tricks and Treats: Sex Workers Write about Their Clients (Haworth 2000), which now also appears in Italian (Effepi Libri 2007).

Mattilda’s articles, essays, interviews, reviews, and stories appear regularly in a variety of publications, including the San Francisco Bay Guardian, AlterNet, Bitch, Utne Reader, Bookslut, and she writes a monthly column in Maximumrocknroll.

Mattilda is the reviews editor at the feminist magazine Make/shift, where she also writes a column.

Mattilda’s direct action activism has included ACT UP in the early ‘90s, Fed Up Queers in the late ‘90s, Gay Shame, and numerous lesser-known (or even unnamed) groups.


Mattilda loves feedback, so do contact her. You can also check in on her blog at nobodypasses.blogspot.com.