Joe Baumann Bücher

Kyle Filburn appears to have a picture-perfect life. He's entering his senior year, in a relationship with a great girl, on his high school's three-times-straight state championship soccer team, and an art professor from the local university has invited him to show and sell his work in his gallery. But a chance meeting with a midfielder from a rival high school creates cracks in this picture-perfect life. Kyle develops feelings for this boy, throwing him into confusion. What does he want? And with whom? And when an anonymous patron starts buying his art, Kyle starts to wonder whether he should really be pursuing art school rather than athletics. It becomes crystal clear that this picture-perfect life no longer reflects who Kyle is or who he wants to be...but what does that mean for Kyle?

A group of restaurant employees in a small Missouri college town faces a surreal summer when familiar people mysteriously vanish, replaced by strangers known only to them. While the rest of the world remains unaware, the staff learns they can restore one person's memory each. This leads to profound choices as they grapple with identity, connection, and the significance of their selections. The narrative explores themes of memory, loss, and the impact of personal choices in a shifting reality.

Set against the backdrop of modern-day St. Louis and Lafayette, this collection of eleven stories reimagines the biblical plagues from Exodus through the experiences of young LGBTQ+ characters. As they navigate their journeys of love and acceptance amid surreal events involving frogs, flies, and other plagues, the narrative balances playful elements with personal struggles. Joe Baumann's work not only reflects on historical themes but also offers a path towards understanding and growth in contemporary society.

In Joe Baumann's newest collection Where Can I Take You When There's Nowhere to Go, queer men explore their sense of who they are and what they want, often in worlds that are tilted askew from what we might expect. Thirteen surreal short stories utilize the strange and the bizarre as a backdrop for explorations of loneliness, queer coming-of-age, self-discovery, and loss. In "We Adore These Bodies Until They Are Gone," people evaporate when suffering isolation and directionless; in "Happy Birthdays," characters transform into different ages when they consume particular kinds of cake; and in the titular story, a pair of lonely teenagers come together at a party after one of them gifts the other with a small cloud he has spun out of his own hands.Baumann's tender vignettes of love, anger, grief, and desire are a stunning ode to the places and people that can give us solace within an absurd and chaotic world.