Published by Suspect Thoughts Press

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PULLING TAFFY

Pulling Taffy inhabits the boundaries between fiction, autobiography, and truth. It's about choosing to remain dangerous and unrepentant, struggling to survive this ravaging world without losing a sense of integrity and charm. Moving from mid-nineties Boston, to post-grunge Seattle, to Giuliani's New York, Pulling Taffy is about searching for home and not necessarily finding it.

"Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's debut novel kicks mainstream lit in the teeth."
–San Francisco Bay Guardian

"Sycamore's debut, Pulling Taffy, has a voice so raw yet so vivid that it's nothing less than cinematic."
–Out

"Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's fiction debut is a sharp and sparkling picaresque of queens and k-holes, grandmothers and tricks, friends and freaks. If David Lynch and David Wojnarowicz created a rebuttal to Will and Grace, it could very well be this book. Sycamore's keen eye reveals the everygay as not merely absurd but grotesque. Like good drugs, Sycamore's writing leaves me craving more."
–D. Travers Scott, author of One of These Things Is Not Like the Other

"As a work of literature--and Pulling Taffy is terrific literature--this book transverses a series of expected genres. It's a cross between Kerouac's On the Road and John Rechy's City of Night, except that it isn't as repetitious as the former or as sentimental as the latter. Sycamore has a unique voice--reminiscent of Frank O'Hara's 'and-then-I-did-this-and-then-I-did-that' school of poetry-that hints at drugged-out-drag patois but is firmly located in an urban vernacular that is familiar to everyone, but still surprising in its lilt and cadences."
–Michael Bronski, author of Pulp Friction

"Each chapter of Pulling Taffy reads like a stack of Nan Goldin color photos come to life. The exuberant rhythm of Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's over-the-top honesty sent me into an erotic trance."
–Annie Sprinkle, author of Dr. Sprinkle's Spectacular Sex

"With a reporter's eye and the ear of a spy, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore writes, in Pulling Taffy,everything we would never have guessed about being young, available, and high as a kite in a handful of cities at the turn of our mercantile century. He and his book are beyond good and evil, he's Nietzsche Junior."
–Kevin Killian, author of I Cry Like a Baby and Little Men

"You'll never say, 'Oh my God' out loud so many times...it'll cause you to call up friends and read entire chapters to them!"
–Instinct

"Sycamore's prose achieves a neon state that can be emotional, scathing and arousing at the same time."
–HX

"I admire the candor and the reticence in this beautiful, anguished, funny novel. I have seen the future and it is Pulling Taffy."
–Edmund White, author of A Boy's Own Story