Tricyclist

“This is a book about life and art in all its wonderful, imperfect strangeness.”—Rachel Brittain, Book Riot

“Joon Oluchi Lee is one of my favorite writers. A quick-change artist with a blazing intellect, he startles with his wicked wit and mix of rawness and sophistication. In Tricyclist, vexed, sexed, and indexed types orbit the narrator Howie Song, offering all kinds of distractions and attractions. Identity is a flipbook of possibilities, malleable in a way that excites and also threatens dissolution (which is maybe a relief). Raunch, philosophical asides, and a scavenger hunt for connection and love are all propelled by Lee’s masterful maverick style and brilliant humor.”—Nate Lippens

“Across lush hangouts with friends and hookups with lovers, Joon Oluchi Lee’s Tricyclist paints shimmering portraits of the most beautiful blouses and bars and bodies laid bare alongside our hopelessly alluring narrator. Through Howie’s careening sex drives and death drives, sensuality is everything, and with Lee’s keen attunement to life’s viscera, Tricyclist aches gorgeously. What a rhapsodic balm to my 2026.”—Benedict Nguyễn

“Tricyclist is a sex-forward, strikingly original story of queer life in San Francisco that feels so fresh it left my fingers wet. Joon Oluchi Lee’s eye is as sharp as his prose, rendering characters and scenarios with gossipy frankness. Kinetic and true and hyper-alive.”-Michelle Tea


“Lee (Lace Sick Bag) trains a droll, analytical eye on sex, desire, and gender in this delicious avant-garde novella.”—Publishers Weekly, in praise of Neotenica

“Neotenica resists easy codifications. Through their refracting, and converging identities, the characters of Neotenica function in tandem; a warm ball of sweet matter hurtling through space and yearning for the freedom to exist as itself, not as its facsimile.”—June Lei, The Brooklyn Rail

“Sentence-level sexy and surprisingly funny, my kind of thriller. Joon Oluchi Lee cracks open a window onto a very familiar Bay Area, yet one I’ve never before seen in fiction. I am obsessed with this book!”—Andrea Lawlor, in praise of Neotenica

“Hot, electric, and funny as all hell. This tiny kaleidoscopic explosion of a book is a beautiful dream examining desire, race, tenderness, class, femininity, family, children, and dogs.”—Casey Plett, in praise of Neotenica

“Clinically described, sexually candid, and viscerally detailed, this is a novel in fragments that builds toward a sadness almost like hope. If you know what this book is when you finish it, then you might not have really finished it.”—Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, in praise of Neotenica

Joon Oluchi Lee lives and writes in femininity and feminism. He is the author of Neotenica (Nightboat Books, 2020), which won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction. Also the author of 94 (2015) and Lace Sick Bag (2013), as well as various essays on queer theory, feminism, and fiction writing, he is Professor in Literary Arts & Studies at Rhode Island School of Design, and, with his partner Roddy, co-parent of their rescue dogs Nella and Sami.

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