Still Alive
a novel by LJ Pemberton
“I keep thinking of Still Alive as a queer Fight Club (1996) for the millennial generation…If Fight Club touted moralistic dogma and material deprivation as a path to liberation, Still Alive laughs in the face of such naïve confidence in easy solutions.” – Full Stop
“We were together and not.”
“Here is the highest compliment I can pay a fellow artist—when I reached the last page, the last line, the final word of LJ Pemberton’s Still Alive, it was enough.
A love story rendered in a pointillism so wholly convincing it might as well be photo-realism and with just that remove — “It is a comedy, youth” “it is easier to admit how sad I am if I call myself a fool” — that allows us to near the flame and have our own wounds cauterized, not burned. Like watching a skilled surgeon tend to those wounds — figuring out “what is a cut and what is just blood” — and not know which it is that commands the attention, the hurt or the healing.
This is what it’s like when, sometime between getting out of bed and returning to it, you encounter a work of art. This is what it’s like when someone else’s truth reads like your own. This is what it’s like to feel less alone.”
—Guillermo Stitch, author of Lake of Urine
High Praise:
V expects a tug-of-war romance with the charming yet withholding LEX to cure her early-2000s ennui, but her family’s chaos threatens to derail her overdue adulthood. This fast-paced swirl of memory and action hurtles toward a surprisingly hopeful end. Sexy, with razor-sharp humor and heart-tugging romance, STILL ALIVE is a novel to fall into, in love with, and find yourself changed.