Joss Lake

author of three books, most recently the novel Summer Fun, published in July by Soho Press.

I love Joss Lake’s vision of the future in , a holographic vista of glamorous trans influencers and a secret cabal of benign operator-caretakers overlaying a world of trans angst, restorative desert retreats, witch roommates, and crappy dog-walking gigs. It’s a compelling contribution to the current effort to marry literary fiction and a sense of , how the internet gets in our souls. This resonates a lot with me as a reader in 2021—following a year in which for many people the social and political world collapsed into a single digital point—and as a trans reader, whose experience of the digital world is sometimes freer than the material one. What I is that Lake doesn’t cast the internet as a villain or a corrupting agent: It’s the water we swim in. It holds the potential to push us away from one another into private swirls of envy, anger, and resentment, and it also holds the potential to bear us up, to carry us together toward places of solidarity and transformation. I am extremely into this trans guy buddy comedy about being there for your friend who’s trapped in the Shadowlands and can’t get out. So I was stoked to have the chance to ask Lake some questions about this world he’s built.