Reviews of Interesting Monsters

Listed as one of Out Magazine’s “Top 100 of 2001”

“[Alvarez’s] style is frank and clear, encouraging the reader to be swept up more by the characters’ choices and actions than the actual words chosen to paint them. This is experimental fiction meant for wide audiences—very accessible and entertaining. It is also queer fiction that has grown up past adolescence; it's affectionate and funny, but reasonable.” —Minneapolis City Pages

“Set mostly in gay experience, these fresh, artfully crafted tales touch on recognizable themes—allure, anxiety, redemption, prejudice, and loss—that shiver to life under the author’s masterly touch. Alvarez gives body to the flutters of human essence in spare prose….Highly recommended.” —Library Journal

 “Playful, wry and tinged with melancholy, this promising debut collection of 6 short stories nimbly sidesteps the tropes of gay fiction….These are thoughtful, ambitious tales.”—Publishers Weekly

“These warm-hearted, witty and psychologically smart stories are the best fiction I’ve read in a long time. Aldo Alvarez is a tirelessly inventive, irrepressible storyteller.” —Carol Bly

“ Aldo Alvarez’s first collection, Interesting Monsters, is more than interesting. Alvarez has a poet’s eye and a confessor’s soul. Honesty resides where it is not welcomed, as each of the stories reach into the contradiction of what it is we call life. Interesting, yes, incredible, of course, awesome, absolutely.” —Helena Maria Viramontes

“Aldo Alvarez’s zany, original, offbeat, and always inspired collection of short stories gives the lie to the idea that all gay short stories have to be clones. At the same time, it brings to earth the myth that all experimental fiction has to have its head in the clouds. Interesting Monsters is moving, often quite funny, and always strangely human.” —Felice Picano, The Book of Lies and Like People in History

“For all their thematic and compositional risks, the stories in Interesting Monsters touch upon the most venerable themes: love, loss, and the drive for meaning. Aldo Alvarez has fashioned a book that reads like a surprising, and sometimes unsettling, collection of interwoven fables, each configured in unique and compelling prose.” —Bernard Cooper, Truth Serum and Guess Again